Teacher Created Materials | www.tcmpub.com | 800-858-7339 PROFESSIONAL RESOURCES What the Science of Reading Says: Literacy Strategies for Grades 1–2 By Erica Bowers Grades 1–2 | 131697 | $34.99 What the Science of Reading Says: Literacy Strategies for Early Childhood By Jodene L. Smith Early Childhood | 131696 | $34.99 What the Science of Reading Says: Literacy Strategies for Secondary Grades By Laura Keisler Secondary Grades | 131699 | $34.99 What the Science of Reading Says: Literacy Strategies for Grades 3–5 By Laura Keisler Grades 3–5 | 131698 | $34.99 Available in grade ranges to meet your needs. 22 Points to Ponder 1 . Think about your own development as a reader. How did you develop accuracy, automaticity, and prosody in your reading? Were there specific activities or lessons that your teachers or parents engaged in with you to nurture these critical competencies? 2 . S. Jay Samuels (1979) first described the importance of having students read a passage repeatedly. Recall instances in your own life when you read a passage (or, for that matter, watched a television program or sang a song) multiple times. Why did you engage in the repeated reading, viewing, and/or singing? What implications might these memories have for your own teaching? 3 . Prosody is usually associated with oral reading. However, for prosody to have a true impact on reading, it needs to be active during silent reading as well. Do you hear yourself when you read silently? Do you attend to punctuation, even when the punctuation is not marked, when reading silently? If you do hear yourself, do you hear your own voice, a narrator’s voice, or different character voices? 23 CHAPTER 3 TEACHING FLUENCY—THE BASICS Fluency consists of accuracy and automaticity in word decoding, and prosody, or meaningful expression and text phrasing, in oral (and silent) reading. Let’s explore how it can be taught to students—especially from a practice and performance perspective. Several very basic principles can guide you in making fluency instruction an integral part of your reading curriculum, from pre-kindergarten through the secondary grades. Organizing Your Time Time for instruction is always an issue. Time in the school day is precious; time given for one hour of the curriculum is time that cannot be used for any other area. In our experience, thirty to sixty minutes per day need to be provided for fluency instruction in the elementary grades. Half that time should be devoted to word decoding accuracy (word study) and half should be devoted to working on automaticity and prosody. If you tend to segment your literacy instruction into defined blocks of time (e.g., four blocks a day), one block should be devoted to decoding accuracy and one block to automaticity and prosody (see Figure 3.1). We certainly recognize that this segmentation of time must be viewed as variable—on some days more time is devoted to one block over another. For example, on days in which students actually perform, more time may need to be devoted to automaticity and prosody. It may seem obvious that a significant amount of time per day needs to be devoted to fluency. Fluency is important—it has been identified by the National Reading Panel as critical to students’ reading development, and it needs to be taught. Yet, an evaluation study of reading instruction in the United States found that, on average, A Division of Teacher Created Materials 125 LITERACY Building Educator Capacity 24 less than five minutes per day were devoted to fluency (Gamse et al. 2008). More recently, elementary teachers surveyed about the various components or competencies related to reading reported that fluency was the least emphasized and given the least amount of instructional time (Rasinski et al. 2020). We can’t help but wonder if part of the reason that reading achievement has not improved significantly over the past three decades, as noted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (U.S. Department of Education 2022), is because fluency continues to be a relatively neglected goal of the literacy curriculum. Figure 3.1 Example of a Block Literacy Curriculum 30 minutes: Word accuracy (phonics and word study) 30 minutes: Automaticity and prosody (fluency) 30 minutes: Small-group reading (comprehension) 30 minutes: Written expression (writing) Accuracy in Decoding: Word Study Since fluency involves dealing with the printed word, instruction in word decoding is clearly called for. Before they can think of reading words automatically and with expression, students need to be able to read the words accurately. This calls for a dedicated block of time devoted to the study of words—how they are constructed and what they mean. Word study lays the foundation for later work on automaticity and prosody. Word study involves all aspects of words: phonics, spelling, learning the literal meaning of words, discovering the history and origin of certain words, and learning the nuanced or connotative meaning of words. There are many excellent resources devoted to ways to teach words productively, such as A Fresh Look at Phonics (Blevins 2016), Daily Word Ladders (Rasinski 2005), Words Their Way (Bear et al. 2019), Bringing Words to Life (Beck et al. 2013), Making Sense of Phonics (Beck and Beck 2013), Vocabulary Ladders (Rasinski and 25 Cheesman-Smith 2014), Making and Writing Words (Rasinski and Heym 2007), and Go Figure! Exploring Figurative Language (Rasinski, Zutell, and Cheesman-Smith 2017). Focusing on word families, word building, word sorting, word games, and high- frequency words are all productive and engaging approaches to teach children about word decoding. Providing an in-depth treatment of word study is beyond the scope of this book on practice and performance. However, we will share with you how word study can be connected to the other parts of the fluency curriculum. Suffice it to say that the study of words is essential to success in fluency in particular and reading in general. The Gradual Release of Responsibility Model Any learning—whether it is learning to read, learning math, learning a jumpshot in basketball, or learning to drive a car—is optimized when a certain series of steps is followed. This approach is called the Gradual Release of Responsibility (Fisher and Frey 2021; Pearson and Gallagher 1983). In this approach, whatever is to be learned (or taught) is first modeled for the learner by the teacher. In essence, the teacher takes full responsibility for the task to be learned, and, while demonstrating the task to the learner, the teacher engages the learner in a focused discussion in which critical elements of the task are highlighted (coaching). As the learner begins to develop some understanding of the learning task at hand, the teacher gradually shifts responsibility for the task to the learner. Initially, responsibility for the task is shared by both the teacher and learner; and little by little, the learner is given increasingly more responsibility until the learning task is performed solely by the learner under the supervision of the teacher. Eventually, the learner will be able to perform the task alone, without the assistance or supervision of the teacher. Hopefully, you find this gradual release model intuitively appealing. Most successful, effective, and efficient task learning is imbued with this model. Learning fluency in reading is no exception. To develop fluency, the task needs to first be modeled by the teacher, then shared in its performance by teacher and student, and finally performed by the student alone, under the supervision of the teacher. In the following sections, you will see how the gradual release of responsibility is manifested in fluency instruction. To become a fluent reader, the fluency task needs to first be modeled by the teacher, then shared in its performance by teacher and student, and finally performed by the students alone, under the supervision of the teacher.