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Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction
Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2005 by Stahl, Steven A, Heubach, Kathleen M
What Level of Material Should Children Be Reading Independently?
Because students generally choose books at a 92% accuracy rate or higher, rather than the traditionally accepted 98%, we feel that this somewhat more difficult rate should be thought of as the child's instructional level, at least in a program similar to this. This somewhat more difficult level has also been suggested by Clay (1985) and Powell (cited in Wixson & Lipson, 1991) and adopted by Wixson and Lipson as well. We also have some evidence that children are able to gain instructionally from somewhat more difficult material than is traditionally assumed. This evidence comes from our observations of the effects of repeated reading on oral reading accuracy and rate.
What Level of Material is Appropriate For Instruction?
The results of this study suggest that children can benefit from reading material well below the 95% accuracy rate traditionally recommended for instruction (Wixson & Lipson, 1991). In fact, students appeared to benefit from reading stories in the first sampling even though they were reading them with an average accuracy rate of 85%, which would be considered frustration level. Students were able to benefit from reading material at these lower levels of accuracy because the higher support they were given for the reading through the routines of the program. In this program, students were supported in their reading by having multiple exposures to the same material, by having the stories read to them, by exposure to the vocabulary prior to their own reading, by reading the story at home one or more times, possibly by echo reading, and by partner reading. This high level of support is considerably greater than what is typically provided in a traditional Directed Reading Activity.
We argue that the instructional reading level for a given child is inversely related to the degree of support given to the reader. That is, the more support given, the lower the accuracy level needed for a child to benefit from instruction. In classroom organizations such as our fluency-oriented instruction, students benefited from reading material of greater relative difficulty because they were given greater amounts of support for that reading.
Another source of word recognition support is pictures. Pictures in texts can improve children's word recognition (Denburg, 1976-1977), at least while the picture is present (although pictures can retard the development of context-free word recognition, since readers may over-rely on illustrations for cues [e.g., Singer, Samuels, & Spiroff, 1973-1974]). Pictures can also aid in comprehension (see Schallert, 1980, for review). The use of picture books in early grades may support children's ability to read material with fewer words correctly recognized. This may account for the lower criteria for instructional level observed by Clay (1985) and Powell (cited in Wixson & Lipson, 1991) for primary grade readers. Such readers tend to read more heavily illustrated material, which indicates they are less reliant on knowing the words to read the text competently.
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