Week 6 Assigment 2

Reading Fluency

 

Reading fluency is important because in order to improve comprehension students need to be fluent readers.  Reading fluency makes the connection from reading individual words to understanding text as a whole.  Students who are not fluent reader focus mainly on identifying individual words which detracts from their ability to comprehend the meaning of the text they are reading.  Student’s reading fluency can be assessed using the words-correct-per-minute assessment.  Although it can be time consuming the assessment provides an accurate and valuable measure of student’s individual reading ability.  These results can help gauge student growth.  In the early grades this type of assessment can be used to “screen” students and identify any issues or struggling readers so that an early intervention can take place.  The assessment can then be used to monitor the reader’s growth.   The fluency scale is useful in identifying student’s skill level and even for creating goals to reach higher levels, similarly to how we do in math. 


In the early grades it is necessary to focus a major portion of class time on identifying basic words.  It is necessary to motivate students to become skillful readers and to provide multiple opportunities for students to read words during class time.  Words should be posted all around the classroom as labels so that students can internalize these basic words.  To continue reading progress it is important as students progress through the grades to offer a variety of texts that interest that them so that they want to read and can be exposed to a wider vocabulary and constantly be introduced to new words while becoming fluent readers still in those basic words they come across daily.  In order to help struggling readers improve their reading fluency it is important to have either an assistant or designate time yourself to work independently with that student.  Also giving flash cards of words with pictures can be helpful.  For ELL students I think any sort of visual aid to accompany words is very helpful.  During a lesson I think it is important to have time where the teacher reads to the students, the students read aloud, and then students get to read independently.  It is important that students get the opportunity to hear their classmates read aloud as they follow along.  It is also useful to have on level readers model reading a portion of text so that struggling readers can follow along and listen to each word; this helps with word recognition (reading and hearing simultaneously).