Comprehension requires the fluent master of the surface-level aspects of reading.” Jay Samuels in the 1970’s, “If you are slow in word identification, you have trouble focusing on and attending to what you are reading, and therefore your comprehension is lower than it should be.” Thirty years later (2006) he goes on to say that “The link between fluency and overall reading proficiency is now well established. This is a capacity that we have, learning something so well that we can do it almost without thinking.Īccording to research done by S. So, learning to read automatically is a huge achievement for our brain. In fact, we are more automatic when reading than when speaking. In fact one of the first reading fluency researches, psychologist William MacKeen Cattell (1886), discovered that you could read a word (like tiger) faster than you can name a picture of a pouncing feline creature!Ĭattell was the first person to recognize that we become quite ‘automatic’ when we read. The importance of reading fluency has been noted for many years. The key to the success was doing the repeated oral reading over a period of time e.g. Substantial gains in reading fluency came from repeated oral reading of various sorts such as letters or words for five or six minutes a day. Felton (1999) defined fluency as “‘the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly, and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading, such as decoding”.Ĭecil Mercer, a researcher from the University of Florida, published his results from his study Effects of Fluency Intervention for Middle Schoolers with Specific Learning Disabilities in (2000) stating daily practice can be for as little as five or six minutes. Reading fluency encompasses the speed or rate of reading, as well as the ability to read materials with expression. This automatic reading then gives you the ability to comprehend what you have read. When you read with fluency you do so without thinking of the reading process. If you can’t read rapidly, you can’t hold large pieces of language – text in meaning! The studies also show that slow single word reading leads to poor comprehension and frustration. To be an efficient reader, you need to be able to retrieve words automatically. Reading fluency is retrieval automaticity. If the underlying cause is one of mispronunciation, there is another solution. See Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills. The solution to both of these problems – the skipping & repeating words or the slow processing of the words is the same – reading drills that are short in duration that are specifically designed to work on the visual tracking as well as speed in a short time frame. The other problem could be that the child is a slow processor – if they read accurately aloud but are slow when they are reading. He had tested to be gifted, but took ‘forever’ to read his assignments. This happened often in my home with one of my children. And, usually when a child is a slow reader it is because they are missing bits and pieces when they are reading, so they re-read the text to make it make sense to them. It doesn’t matter whether a child is dyslexic, has an identified learning disability, or are even gifted, some children are slow readers. Are they skipping, omitting, or repeating words when they read OR are they mispronouncing them? To tell if this is the case, listen to them read aloud. Typically when a child knows how to read but they are slow readers the actual problem is due to visual tracking difficulties. Let’s look at the underlying cause first. How can you help your child improve their reading speed? As a parent though, it can be tough knowing what to do about it. Every child is expected to learn faster and to read faster. In the classroom it doesn’t matter if you have a learning problem, LD, dyslexia, or ADD. Children are expected to learn more than ever before and to learn faster than ever before. Schools, teachers, parents, even homeschooling parents are becoming more concerned about reading fluency and speed with good reason. He reads 23 words per minute and according to the teacher he should be at 43 words per minute! What do I do to help?
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