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Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction
Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2005 by Stahl, Steven A, Heubach, Kathleen M
What Are the Effects of the Program on Struggling Readers?
The most pronounced effects of this program were on children who were struggling; that is, those reading above the primer but below the second-grade level. As noted earlier (see Figures 3 and 5), all children reading at a primer level or higher at the beginning of the year were reading at the second-grade level by the end of the year. In ordinary classroom situations, these children tend to fall progressively further behind the average for their grade (Juel, 1988; Stanovich, 1986). Programs that have successfully accelerated the growth of these readers have been both fairly expensive and difficult to implement, like Reading Recovery (Clay, 1985) or Success for All (Madden, Slavin, Karweit, Donlan, & Wasik, 1997), or designed for first graders. The approach taken here is easy to implement, involves only classroom teachers, and works with second-grade children.
The effects of this program on children who initially read below the primer level were mixed. About half of these children made adequate progress; the remainder did not. For these children, the teachers made special adaptations, including books with reduced vocabulary, providing extra time for reading, and so on. A program based on repeated readings of grade-level material requires a certain initial level of competence. For those without such competence, more intensive remediation is required.
Since our struggling readers had more exposure to the materials, through additional readings at home and through some additional work in class, they were able to read materials of much greater than expected difficulty. In turn, the reading of more difficult material aided their growth as readers, allowing them to read second-grade material with more ease. This seems to be the inverse process to that involved in Matthew Effects (Stanovich, 1986). Stanovich suggests that struggling readers, because they read relatively easy material and read less of it than proficient readers, fall further and further behind their higher achieving peers. Instead, we suggest that our classroom organization provides a mechanism for at least some children to catch up with their peers.
What Have We Learned?
This paper has presented a complex evaluation of a complex program, an attempt to reorganize second-grade reading instruction around a set of theory-derived principles. For the most part, this reorganization was successful in achieving its goals. The program was sustainable over two years, teachers and children perceived it and its various components positively, and it led to gains in achievement. These gains were found for all children reading at a primer level or higher initially and for about half of those who could not initially read a primer passage.
We also learned about the reciprocal nature of instruction and text difficulty. The traditional notion of instructional level, based as it was on a traditional notion of instruction, seems not to be relevant to this type of classroom setting. Instead, with the greater support given to readers through repeated readings of instructional text in various venues and with various procedures, children are able to learn from material that they initially read with significant difficulty. This program provides that structure in a form easily usable by teachers and responded to by students.
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