By Brock Eide, MD MA, co-founder of Dyslexic Advantage and Neurolearning SPC In recent years, research on reading development has revealed that truly skilled reading requires two kinds of skills: the ability to quickly and accurately decode or “sound out”...
Clever Ways To Practice Repeated Reading [Premium]
It was in the late 1970’s that educational researchers began to question the practice of reading aloud different tasks as a way to make children more fluent readers. With this approach, every new day saw new challenges reading aloud for struggling readers so that they failed to gain proficiency, and if anything were more likely to develop a dislike or avoidance of reading. What actually showed greater success with reading fluency, was giving students repeated practice with the same passage. The general approach is to have a student or teacher pick a passage (a quote, poem, excerpt from a poem) that is 50-300 words long. The teacher or partner reads it aloud, then the student (echo reading). The goal is to have the student read […]
Reading Fluency: What is Timed Guided Repeated Reading and Why Should Students Do It? [Premium]
In a recent report in the Journal of Learning Disabilities, Lee and Yoon reported that repeated reading had significant beneficial effects on the reading fluency of students with a reading disability. Listening to the passage first increased the benefit. Excerpt: “Reading the passage at least four times increased reading fluency more than two to three times…repetition is a critical variable, and automaticity was based on retrieval (memory) rather than adjustment of reading procedures (e.g. word decoding strategies… The listening passage preview with the proper prosody that was modeled by the teachers may have enhanced understanding of text and reduced the moderator of negative emotion (e.g. confusion, anxiety, frustration) presumed or students with RD (e.g. “with listening passage preview there is less anxiety.” N.B. Fluency practice […]