June 9th readings

In the article, One- Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction, discussed the controversy of whether one minute fluency assessments truly lead to our understanding of the child's development. The author claims that fluency is made of four components: accuracy, rate, prosody and comprehension. An important aspect of accuracy was brought to my attention. The author uses an example of Kenny's think-aloud response for a passage that he reads, where he makes only a few errors. Although Kenny only misread 4% of the words a simple mistake of mistaking the word "burned" for "buried," tampers with the meaning of the passage. This reminds me of my own experiences of reading comprehension. I've always struggled with paying attention to detail in everything I do. I have many times mistaken words, which leads me to misinterpret the meaning of the text. This aspect of accuracy reminds me to stress the importance of encouraging children to slow down while reading, the meaning is more important than the time it takes to finish a given passage.  Another thing that struck me in this article, was the important of figuring out the “why” children are struggling with accuracy and speed as opposed to “whether” the child is struggling. Lastly, the author stresses the importance of incorporating endurance. I never thought of reading like a sport. Children need to build of their endurance by reading longer texts, so children will use their literacy skills to accomplish a variety of literacy tasks for a variety of purposes. 

In the article, Creating Fluent Readers, Rasinski focuses on the importance of developing fluent readers. I had always heard the term “fluency” but never truly understand the concept. The definition given helped me fully understand the concept, “refers to the reader’s ability to develop control over surface-level text processing so that he or she can focus on understanding the deeper levels of meaning embedded in the text” (p.46). One part of the article that struck me as interesting was the distinction between fast and fluent. The author voices her concern that some schools are stressing the importance of “picking up the pace,” encouraging the children to beat their previous scores, and the emphasis of speed over meaning. In school, I remember feeling rushed while reading. I was more focused on finishing my assignment; I often did not fully understand the meaning of the passage. As the author states, students’ reading rates will improve as they become naturally more efficient and confident in their ability to decode words.

Fostering Fluency in the book, Classrooms that Work was my favorite reading. I believe that this reading really laid out what fluency was and how to foster fluency in struggling readers. I think that this was one of my favorite readings because I would relate to it. The author stresses the importance of making a commitment you have to make to help all of your students become fluent readers is to make sure all your students are spending some of their time reading easy text. Throughout my schooling, I always felt like I was being pushed to read books that were beyond my reading level. After reading this chapter, it has become clear to me that my problems as a young reader were fluency.

In all three readers, the three components of fluency were stressed, accuracy, speed and prosody. While all readings focused on different aspects of fluency they all provided suggestions that teachers can use to help their struggling readings.