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Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2005 by Stahl, Steven A, Heubach, Kathleen M

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Hoffman (1987) describes an oral recitation lesson format to substitute for the traditional basal reader lesson. In this format, the teacher begins by reading the story from the reader aloud and discussing its content. In this way, comprehension is dealt with prior to practice in oral reading. The teacher then rereads the story paragraph by paragraph, with the children following along and echoing back each paragraph. The students then choose or are assigned a portion of the text to master. They practice this text and read it to the group. They then go on to the next story. On their own, children practice the story until they can read it at an adequate rate with no errors. Hoffman reports that the lessons were successful but does not present statistical data. Morris and Nelson (1992) found that a program based on Hoffman's, but including partner reading rather than small-group work, helped children in one class develop word recognition skills. However, they did not use a control group and did not report statistical tests.

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Rasinski et al. (1994) used a similar format in their fluency development lesson, but instead of using basal reader stories, they used 50- to 150-word texts. Teachers read each text aloud, students and teachers read the texts chorally, and students practiced reading in pairs. Because of the short texts, teachers were able to do all parts of the lesson in a 15-minute session each day. The only gains attributable to the treatment were in reading rate. There were no significant differences between the experimental treatment and the control in overall reading level as measured by an informal reading inventory.

Goals for Our Fluency-Based Reading Program

Using the stage model of reading, the purpose of our fluency-oriented reading instruction was to help children move from the accuracy-driven decoding, typical of the Decoding stage, to the fluency and automaticity needed to take advantage of reading to learn. We hypothesized that children move through this fluency stage largely through practice in reading connected text for comprehension, using both repeated readings of the same text and wide readings of different texts. Therefore, we developed five goals for our fluency-based reading program:

* Lessons will be comprehension oriented, even when smooth and fluent oral reading is being emphasized. This was important because we wanted students to be aware that the purpose of reading is getting meaning and that the practice they were undertaking would make them better comprehenders, not simply better word callers. In their analysis of oral reading lessons, Anderson, Wilkinson, and Mason (1990) found that maintaining a focus on comprehension during reading lessons not only improved comprehension, but also children's word recognition skills.

* Children will read material at their instructional level. Traditionally it is thought that reading material that is too difficult or too easy does not improve children's reading as efficiently as reading material that is well matched to the child's ability (Allington, 1984). (As will be discussed later, our findings question this assumption because children read material that was well above their instructional levels, with a great deal of scaffolding, and appeared to benefit greatly.) We originally defined instructional level as the level at which they could read with 95-98% accuracy (Wixson & Lipson, 1991). Previous research (e.g., Gambrell, Wilson, & Gantt, 1981) suggested that children do very little reading of connected text at an appropriate instructional level, as little as two to three minutes per day. Our initial goal was to increase the amount of material that children read at this level. However, as will be discussed later, district constraints forced us to modify this goal so that we also increased the amount of reading children did above conventional instructional levels.

Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2005 by Stahl, Steven A, Heubach, Kathleen M

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