Elementary students won't improve reading if key area is neglected, Kent State experts say
In a Sept. 11 guest column (“Ensuring third graders can read an urgent need in Akron”), Steve France bemoaned the fact that despite years of effort to improve reading outcomes of students in Akron and around the country, a third of fourth- and eighth-graders read at a level described as “Below Basic” by the U.S. Department of Education. Only one-third of fourth-graders read at a level considered proficient or advanced. Indeed, as documented in the Beacon Journal, Akron’s own I Promise School has experienced difficulties in helping struggling readers accelerate their progress in reading. France suggests that a communitywide effort is needed to increase the reading achievement levels of our students. We agree.
However, we also feel that relatively minor changes at the school and classroom levels could have a dramatic impact on student achievement. The National Reading Panel, a group of reading experts commissioned by Congress to review the science that supports reading development, identified five key components for success in reading: phonemic awareness (the ability to detect and manipulate the sounds of language), phonics or word decoding, vocabulary or word meaning, comprehension and reading fluency.
It is this last competency that is often neglected in our elementary classroom reading instruction. Greater emphasis in this one area would alone, we feel, lead to significant improvements in overall reading performance. Likewise, whenever literacy instruction happens without this essential component in place, the opposite outcome also holds true.
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We have proof. We are former directors of the Kent State University reading clinic (we call it Camp Read-a-Lot as it takes place over five weeks in the summer). We worked with children, primarily finishing grades K-8 who were experiencing significant difficulties in reading.
In our initial assessments of these children, we found that they were progressing in phonemic awareness, phonics and vocabulary. Their comprehension also was adequate if a text was read to them. However, when they had to read on their own, comprehension usually faltered. Although the problem on the surface was poor reading comprehension, the deeper concern was reading fluency. Although the students could decode the words they encountered, they usually read at an excessively slow pace and in a word-by-word manner.
Their focus was on decoding the words — which they could do, albeit with great effort — and not on the meaning of the texts they were reading. When oral reading fluency and reading expressively (prosodic reading) became the foundations of literacy instruction, we observed children making significant gains in all areas of reading.
We developed a Fluency Development Lesson that aimed at improving students' ability to read words effortlessly and with good expression so that they could focus on meaning rather than on individual words.
Through repeated practice of short texts such as poems, plays, and jokes and riddles, children developed their reading fluency muscles and, as a result, their overall reading performance improved. In as little as 20 days (90 minutes per day) of instruction students made significant progress in reading — in many cases over a year’s growth.
Keep in mind that as struggling readers, these were students who in school failed to make a year’s growth in reading for a year’s worth of instruction. Our research findings of students’ success in reading have been published as peer-reviewed studies in major literacy journals.
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The problem is that reading fluency was identified years ago as a missing component of most reading programs. Yet it continues to be relatively neglected in many classrooms where the instructional emphasis has been placed primarily on developing students’ competencies in phonics.
As professors, we are clearly big proponents of explicitly teaching phonics in the classroom. However, time and again we have observed that when fluency and meaning are not at the forefront of this instruction, children often do not develop the traction they need to move forward with greater reading success.
Exemplary educators understand this research and know how to apply it creatively and artfully. They personalize and go beyond the many prepackaged reading methods and programs to keep fluency and understanding at the forefront of their instruction. The results are significant gains in literacy acquisition, development and ultimately, learner success.
Research universities such as KSU, the University of Akron, the Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and others have conducted study after study demonstrating what is needed to develop successful readers. Schools only need to reach out and partner with their local universities to develop reading programs that meet the specific needs of our children. When schools and universities work together and focus on what matters for struggling readers, we will see remarkable improvements in our students’ reading achievement.
Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D., is professor of literacy education and the Rebecca Tolle and Burton W. Gorman Chair in Educational Leadership at Kent State University. Belinda Zimmerman, Ph.D., of Cuyahoga Falls is professor emeritus of literacy education at Kent State.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Grasping fluency, meaning helps young children learn to read
