Fluency: Instruction

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Fluency Instruction Assessment

• Steven A. Stahl
• The University of Illinois -- Urbana/ Champaign/
  CIERA

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Fluency is more than automatic word recognition

• Children also need to be able to read with
  prosody and expression.

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National Reading PanelFluency Findings

• Guided oral reading is effective in improving
  reading fluency and overall achievement

• Guided oral reading is a grab bag including a lot
  of different procedures including repeated
  reading, assisted reading, impress reading
• Not all approaches are going to be effective

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National Reading PanelFluency Findings

• Encouraging children to read on their own does
  not seem to improve fluency or general reading
  achievement

• This includes DEAR, SSR, Accelerated Reader.
• This is very controversial (and does not make
  sense)

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Why didnt the Report find effects for just
reading?

• The best evidence may be correlational and could
  not be included in this report
• Often children do not choose to read material of
  adequate challenge

• Few studies actually monitored the reading done
  by students

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National Reading PanelFluency Findings

• Fluency-oriented reading approaches seem to be
  effective, but there are very few out there to
  choose from.
• In spite of what report says, have children read.
  
• Teachers should be encouraged to have children
  read material of adequate challenge.

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Being fluent is more than automaticity

• Accuracy
• Rate
• Prosody

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Accuracy

• What is an Instructional level?
• Depends on level of child or whether child is
  reading cold or not
• Depends on level of instruction
• In our work, children could benefit from material
  as low as 85 accuracy with strong instructional
  support

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Accuracy

• High accuracy/low comprehension
• Kendall and Hood found children who were accurate
  but poor comprehenders and good comprehenders,
  but not accurate.
• Carpenter and Paris found a greater tendency for
  older children to be able to read well with weak
  comprehension.
• Carpenter and Paris found that accuracy on IRIs
  they studied correlated significantly with
  comprehension only below the 3rd grade level

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NAEP Fluency Scale

• Level 4 Reads primarily in larger, meaningful
  phrase groups. Although some regressions,
  repetitions, and deviations from text may be
  present, these do not appear to detract from the
  overall structure of the story. Preservation of
  the author's syntax is consistent. Some or most
  of the story is read with expressive
  interpretation.
• Level 3 Reads primarily in three- or
  four-word phrase groups. Some smaller groupings
  may be present. However, the majority of phrasing
  seems appropriate and preserves the syntax of the
  author. Little or no expressive interpretation is
  present.
• Level 2 Reads primarily in two-word phrases
  with some three-or four-word groupings. Some
  word-by-word reading may be present. Word
  groupings may seem awkward and unrelated to
  larger context of sentence or passage.
• Level 1 Reads primarily word-by-word.
  Occasional two-word or three-word phrases may
  occur, but these are infrequent and/or they do
  not preserve meaningful syntax.

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Accuracy -- NAEP Oral Reading Study 4th grade
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Accuracy -- NAEP Oral Reading Study
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Accuracy

• NAEP Oral Reading Study did not find a relation
  between oral reading accuracy and comprehension
• They did, however, find a relation between the
  number of meaning-changing miscues and
  comprehension

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Rate

• Trade-off between accuracy, rate and
  comprehension
• Children may lower rate to improve accuracy, thus
  impairing comprehension
• Thus, may be the relationship between CBM
  performance and comprehension

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Developmental relationships

• As children get more automatic, one would expect
  the relationship between rate and comprehension
  to drop, since, as decoding becomes more
  transparent, variations in language abilities and
  strategic knowledge become more important.

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Prosody and Comprehension

• We examined sound spectrographs of 124 children
  reading the first passage of the Gray Oral
  Reading Test IV
• We found that good and struggling readers could
  be distinguished by intersentential pauses,
  intrasentential pauses, declining frequency at
  end of declarative sentences, but.
• We found that the closeness of the prosodic
  envelope (the contours of the rising and falling
  intonations) to adult readers added significant
  variance to the prediction of comprehension
  beyond that accounted for by word recognition.

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Prosody and comprehension

• We believe, as do others, that prosody reflects
  childrens syntactic processing.
• It is the ability to assign words to syntactic
  categories that accounts for the relationship
  between prosody and comprehension.

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How do you develop fluency?

• Repeated reading?
• Assisted Reading?
• Integrated approaches?

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Repeated Reading (classroom)

• Have children read from the same text.
• Have them start reading orally.
• After 3 minutes, say Stop
• Have them mark last word they read.
• Repeat.
• Children should read further down the page with
  each repeated reading.

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Paired Repeated Reading

• Children read in pairs
• One child reads the text three times
• The other child reviews errors and rates the
  reader on fluency on the third reading.
• The children reverse roles with next section.
• Koskinen, P. S., Blum, I. H. (1986). Paired
  repeated reading A classroom strategy for
  developing fluent reading. The Reading Teacher,
  40, 70-75.

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Assisted Reading

• Teacher and student read passage together,
  repeatedly, until desired level of fluency is
  achieved.

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Assisted Reading

• Teacher and children read passage together.
• Teacher and children re-read until adequate level
  of fluency is attained.

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Research on Repeated and Assisted Reading
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Results

• Repeated reading does not seem to produce higher
  results than a control
• Effects could be due to increased amount of
  reading
• Assisted reading seems to be effective
• Modeling?
• Monitoring?

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Effects of difficulty?
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Effects of Difficulty?
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Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction

• Four teachers, a graduate student, and myself met
  one summer to design the program
• We began with five principles

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Five principles

• All lessons must be comprehension-oriented
• Children will be supported through repeated
  readings
• Children will read at their instructional level
• Children will do partner reading to maximize
  eyes on text time.
• Children will read as much as possible both at
  home and at school.

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• New superintendent mandated that all children
  will read material at their grade placement
• We decided to scaffold children at a higher
  level, using material at their level.

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Three components of fluency-oriented reading
instruction

• Home reading program
• Choice reading
• Redesigned Basal Reading Program

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Redesigned Basal Reading program

• Comprehension Focus
• Teacher reads story to class
• Teacher discusses story
• May do story map, or graphic organizer
• May ask questions

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Redesigned Basal Reading program

• Preparation for reading
• Teacher preteaches vocabulary, does prereading
  activities
• Home reading
• Students bring book home
• Partner reading

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Prepare for reading

• Children need some practice in word reading prior
  to reading.
• In this lesson, children are taught the strategy
  of comparing words to words they already know, as
  well as being taught the new words.

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Comprehensive Reading Program

• Because we are emphasizing fluency, does not mean
  we are neglecting other aspects of reading.

• There are word study lessons as well as
  comprehension building activities.
• Making words
• Compare/contrast
• Comprehension strategy instruction

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Echo Reading

• Echo reading is used for struggling readers to
  provide additional support.

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Home reading

• Children may be asked to read the story at home
  1, 2, 3 or 4 times during the week.
• This gives children additional practice

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Paired reading

• Paired reading is the most efficient way of
  giving children practice in reading connected
  text
• These are two struggling readers.

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Paired Reading

• With more advanced readers, one could combine
  paired reading with reciprocal questions.
• These children had been taught Question-Answer
  Relationships to improve their questioning.

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Home Reading Program

• Students read at home, as part of homework.
• We met with parents as part of a PTO program to
  discuss how to read at home.
• We kept track using logs, but teachers did not
  feel they were efficient.

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Choice Reading

• Children read material of their choosing for
  15-20 minutes per day.
• Allowed for children to read material at their
  instructional level

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Results

• Teachers were able to do the program all year
  long.

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Results

• Children made an average of 1.8 years gain in
  each single year

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Results

• All children who were reading at the primer level
  or higher at the beginning of the year were
  reading at the second grade level or higher at
  the end of the year.

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Results

• Children were able to benefit from material at
  their frustration level, if given adequate
  support.

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Replication

• Purpose To demonstrate that modifying classroom
  instruction to increase the volume of childrens
  reading will improve fluency and comprehension
• Sites
• Athens, GA
• Atlanta, GA
• North Plainfield, NJ

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• Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction
• Supported reading of a single text weekly, using
  repeated reading
• Wide Reading Adaptation
• Uses many of the same techniques as FORI, but has
  children read three or more texts per week
• Control
• Involves teachers using the district's reading
  program as usual

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Measures

• Gray Oral Reading Test IV (GORT)
• Set of graded passages. Scores based on rate and
  accuracy
• Fluency Measure
• Test of Word Reading Efficiency
• Two word lists (sight and nonsense). Scores based
  on number of words read correctly in 45 seconds.
• WIAT Reading Comprehension
• Individual, open ended comprehension measure

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Measures

• The GORT and TOWRE were given three times a year.
  
• The WIAT was given fall and spring.

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Problem

• The control schools were not really control.
• We did not get a control school in Atlanta.
• The control school in Athens was put on a state
  list and underwent an extensive reading
  intervention.
• The control school in New Jersey was a true
  control, but was a high functioning school, with
  excellent instruction.

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Problem

• We analyzed the data with two controls
• A contemporary control analysis used the control
  schools during the same school year.
• A historical control analysis compared the
  treatment schools with the children from all the
  schools at the end of the previous second grade
  year.

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Results -- Historical Controls

• We found statistically significant differences
  between the treatment groups and the historical
  control on all measures (all at p lt .001).
• This suggests that children were performing at a
  higher level after treatment than similar
  children did the year previous.

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Analysis -- Concurrent Controls

• What is presented here is a repeated measures
  analysis. Children were tested three times during
  the year, August/September, January, and
  May/June.
• All analyses are based on a Time x Group
  analysis, with a significant interaction
  considered as evidence for significant treatment
  effects.

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Results -- Concurrent Controls

• Students in all groups made significant progress
  from the beginning of the year on all measures
• The only statistically significant effect was on
  the WIAT Passage Comprehension measure. We found
  a significant (p .044) effect favoring the Wide
  Reading group.
• The effects on the TOWRE subtests and the GORT
  were not statistically reliable.

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Results -- Concurrent Controls

• When we included entering level in the analysis,
  there were significant effects found on the GORT
  and TOWRE.
• The greatest treatment effects were found for
  children who were between 1.0 and 1.7, or
  somewhat below grade level.

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Results -- Concurrent Controls

• Similar to the Stahl et al. Study, children who
  were reading at a primer or higher were reading
  at an average of 3rd grade level at the end of
  second grade.
• In other words, children who began with modest
  entering abilities were ready to begin 3rd grade
  reading 3rd grade materials.

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Scientifically-Based Reading Research?

• When we add programs to schools, we need to worry
  about how they are implemented.
• We need to worry about all the things left out of
  our programs.
• We need to worry about our professional
  development.

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Scientifically based Reading Research?

• Phonics is not, by itself, a solution
• Children will continue to differ by entering
  abilities
• Instruction will have to be differentiated to
  meet those different abilities
• Grouping is and is not a solution
• If you group, you need to make sure that the
  lower ability group receives challenging
  instruction

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Scientifically based Reading Research?

• Differential support with the same curriculum
• May work best for children in the second
  quartile, those who are within the ZPD
• Some children will need external support

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What do we know about fluency?

• Classroom interventions can improve childrens
  reading significantly, even bringing children
  from below grade level to grade level.
• Classroom interventions are practical. They can
  be carried out over a school year.

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What do we know about fluency?

• We know children can read difficult material with
  appropriate support.
• We want children to have some time during the day
  so that they can read easy material as well.

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What do we know about fluency?

• We know that the most important thing one can do
  to improve childrens achievement is to have them
  read text at an appropriate level.
• We do not know whether these approaches work
  because children are reading more or because of
  the repetition.

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What do we know about fluency?

• We think that this instruction will improve
  comprehension.
• We may have to think about how to integrate
  comprehension instruction into fluency-oriented
  reading.

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References

• Kuhn, M. R., Stahl, S. A. (2000). Fluency A
  review of developmental and remedial practices (
  2-008) Center for the Improvement of Reading
  Achievement, University of Michigan.
• Samuels, S. J., Schermer, N., Reinking, D.
  (1992). Reading fluency Techniques for making
  decoding automatic. In S. J. Samuels A. E.
  Farstrup (Eds.), What research says about reading
  instruction (2nd ed., pp. 124-144). Newark, DE
  International Reading Association.
• Stahl, S., Heubach, K., Cramond, B. (1997).
  Fluency-oriented reading instruction. AthensGA
  National Reading Research Center U.S. Dept. of
  Education Office of Educational Research and
  Improvement Educational Resources Information
  Center.

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sstahl_at_uiuc.eduwww.ciera.org