Article #4 Helping Students Become Accurate, Expressive Readers:Fluency Instruction for Small Groups

Abstract from Kuhn, M. (2004, December). Helping Students Become Accurate, Expressive Readers: Fluency Instruction for Small Groups. The Reading Teacher, 58(4), 338–344. doi: 10.1598/RT.58.4.3

Effective approaches to fluency instruction should facilitate automatic and accurate word recognition as well as the ability to read with expression. The study reported in this article focused on instructional approaches that can be used with small groups of learners within a broader literacy curriculum, one that is suitable for flexible grouping. It also explored the relationship between fluent reading and comprehension. Twenty-four struggling second-grade readers were selected to take part in the interventions. The research evaluated two approaches for assisting learners who were making the transition to fluent reading: a modified repeated reading approach, and a scaffolded wide-reading approach in which learners read equivalent amounts of text without the use of repetition. A listening-only group, designed to serve as a Hawthorne control, and a control group were also included. Results indicate that the students in the wide-reading and repeated reading groups demonstrated growth in terms of word recognition in isolation, prosody, and correct words per minute, and that the wide-reading group also demonstrated growth in terms of comprehension. Suggestions for integrating these approaches with the literacy curriculum are discussed.

The problem is ensuring that students are affluent readers. One reason this is important is that affluent readers no longer have to decode every word he or she is reading in the text. It has been a wrong assumption that increased amounts of decoding instruction would automatically lead to improved fluency or relying on round robin type group reading as a main approach for oral reading. The above students listed in the study were assessed by using pre and post testing. The student comprehension, accurate automatic word recognition in the text (QRI and QRI - II), informed reading inventories like standardized tests of Test of Word Recognition Efficiency (TOWRE), and National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).

One of the strengths is the research found out that the fluency oriented oral reading (FOOR) where students read an equivalent amount of non repetitive text , on the fluency development of struggling readers within a flexible group. This approaches works best with students who are working on the mechanics of the reading. The wide-reading approach works best with students who need to work on improving word recognition, expression, and comprehension. A weakness could be that in one of the groups, the FOOR group the students only read six books and had 18 read to them.So although they scored higher in comprehension they weren't technically doing all the work themselves.

This an implication for the classroom in that both groups of FOOR and wide-reading approaches used inflexible grouping formats, which provided effective fluency-oriented instruction. They both ensure that students have increased opportunities to read connected text. The strategies help create high expectations of student accountability for the materials used. This provides a model of expressive reading that is easy to implement, can be used in several ways, and have a variety of texts from basal readers to more challenging trade books.