Elaine, Steve Stahl was my advisor during my graduate work at the University of Georgia (great guy - I do miss him) and while working with him I tried his fluency program with my class of 2nd graders. I've not read Melanie Kuhn's article that you cite below (she was working with Stahl at the same time I was there), so I don't know if the FOOR was exactly the same as the FORI (Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction) (1997) that I tried of his. However, I was disatisfied with it mainly b/c the instruction focused on reading 1 story a week, and began with the teacher reading it aloud to the class on Monday, then pairs reading it chorally or echo reading on Tuesday, etc. I found that my students never had a "cold" read of a text - the teacher always read it aloud first. I would think that after a long period of time doing this, that comprehension would have been compromised, b/c I was basically teaching my kids listening comprehension rather than reading comprehension.
So, that's just one more possible aspect to why there was no improvement on comprehension in those studies. I agree with Kuhn below about too much focus being on fluency rather than comp. P.S. Sorry I'm late on this discussion - I'm about 350 emails behind on the list... Heather Wall/ 3rd grade/ Georgia NBCT 2005 Literacy: Reading - Language Arts The wide-reading group, on the other hand, read a new book at each session. As a result, comprehension, expression, and word recognition may have been viewed as having equivalent importance. It could be that the students developed a broader implicit focus, one that included the understanding and enjoyment of the stories as well as the accurate and expressive reading of the text. It is equally possible that this focus carried over to the posttesting and led to the wide-reading group's growth in comprehension as well as in word recognition and prosody. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
