Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources

What is it? How does it work?

Background:
Repeated oral readings of easy text, often modeled by more fluent readers, assists nonfluent readers.

Overview:
Strategies used to enhance reading fluency share common qualities. These qualities are:
1. use of independent level text (text that has few new words for students) and/or predictable and patterned text (text that has repetitions or patterns as in poetry or song lyrics);
2. modeling by more fluent readers;
3. repeated readings of the text until greater accuracy and speed are achieved.

The following fluency strategies have been effective with struggling secondary readers:

Repeated Readings (Samuels, 1979)
Readers practice repeated oral readings on the same selection until a criterion has been met for words read per minute (speed) or until a certain number of readings has been accomplished (accuracy). The criterion for exceptionally nonfluent readers is 85 words per minute and a half dozen repeated readings are often required to meet it. As students develop fluency, a higher criterion of words per minute is established and fewer readings are required.

Paired Reading (based on Neurological Impress Method, Heckelman, 1969)
A good reader (often a parent) and a less fluent reader read a book aloud together. The good reader slightly leads or follows, depending on the less fluent reader's needs and desires. A log is kept.

Echo Reading and Choral Reading The teacher reads the text aloud while students listen and read along silently. Discussion may follow. The teacher and students read the text together. Then choral or antiphonal choral reading is performed.

Another successful strategy (Schreiber, 1980, 1991; Rasinski, 1990) is for the teacher to mark phrase boundaries with highlighters or slashes, thus delineating meaningful chunks or phrases. Readers then practice with the marked text and reread it in its unmarked version. Students can also be taught to mark phrases after initial instruction with teacher-marked text.

Benefits from each of these strategies include increased fluency, higher accuracy in word recognition, and better comprehension.