Reading Fast vs. Reading Well How many of you have experienced the groans and moans of students when asked to read aloud? I know I have. I’ve had students refuse to completely. Some teachers I know veer away from reading aloud since they believe it is an archaic method. I believe wholeheartedly in in for a variety of reasons. It improves fluency. The best way a student learns to read is to READ. They must have practice and familiarity increases fluency. This is one reason Dolch word lists are popular. Students are able to memorize familiar words. It gives students practice with oral presentations. For students that are fluent readers, it gives them a chance to prepare for speaking in front of crowds. If you make it a regular occurrence in your classroom, they become comfortable with it. Confident. Confidence breeds success. It ensures accountability. You may assign silent reading. How can you ensure the student is actually reading though? This can be especially detrimental to students that struggle with fluency since you have basically handed them an impossible task. Now, I want to clarify how reading aloud should work. I have this conversation with each group of my students in …show more content…
There is a purpose behind it. Teachers may ask you to read aloud to assess your fluency level, increase your content knowledge, or prepare you to become familiar with addressing crowds. I want to clarify about reading fluency. Fluency is how fast you read. It is how many words you are familiar with and say in a determined amount of time. To some people, it comes naturally while others struggle. It takes practice, but not talent. I want you to be able to read fluently so that you become productive members of society. But, I want you to be able to read well. Reading well means pausing at appropriate times, using inflection and emphasis in your tone, and engaging your audience. Let me show you the
7). Students will have the opportunity to practice reading aloud and silently to improve their
During a test, these students were taken to another classroom area so that the inclusion teacher was able to read the test to them. Self-reading in the inclusion classroom is sometimes avoided as much as possible. The inclusion teacher also stated that there have been tests where the amount of information was lessened to avoid additional frustration being added as they are already struggling with reading the test information. According to the general education teacher, students on occasion are encouraged to read out loud. However, there is more of a push for them to participate in classroom or group discussion. Students that are asked to read aloud are based on their ability. This type of interaction makes for a comfortable learning environment and participation with their peers. She stated that she tries to pre-teach information that they will be covering on that day in the form of a warm up when the kids first enter the classroom. Then when they are exposed to the information later on in the class, it is not a total shock of information to
My role as an instructor was to make my students engage with reading as a constant practice not just in the language they were learning, but also in Spanish. Despite the constraints of a given curriculum, I managed to offer my students an environment where they were exposed to multiple reading strategies and practices. I promoted open discussions about the topics my students were interested to read about. However, through this experience, I was not able to identify struggling readers. I thought that if the reader is struggling, the best way to overcome this difficulty is by reading more.
Reading Methods and Learning Disabilities. (1998, April). Learning Disabilities Association Newsbrief, 38(4). Retrieved December 18, 2013
“A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation...the literate and illiterate.” This quote by Jim Trelease accurately describes the state of our society today. The ability to read is so vital to our past, present, and future. However, though we have raised our standards, demanded higher test scores, and increased the pressure on our educators, there is little to show for it. Jim Trelease shares the statistic in his book, The Read-Aloud Handbook, that despite our desperate efforts, there has only been a one-point improvement in reading scores between
Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) is a component of many school-reading programs and has been widely used in the classroom for almost 40 years. The implementation of SSR varies to a large degree and research has been mixed regarding it effectiveness in relation to reading attitude and reading comprehension. Lyman C. Hunt, Jr. from the University of Vermont originally introduced the idea of Sustained Silent Reading in the early 1960’s. It gained popularity in the 1970’s with the guidelines provided by reading experts Robert and Marlene McCracken (Pilgreen, 2000; Trelease, 2001). National attention was given to SSR when Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading was published in 1985. The focus of the study was to examine the difficulties American students were having in the area of reading (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). The report also stated the act of reading for pleasure is the best predictor of reading comprehension growth of vocabulary and reading achievement gains in elementary age students (p. 77-78).
Reading is a complex process that’s difficult to explain linearly. A student’s reading capabilities begin development long before entering the school setting and largely start with exposure (Solley, 2014). The first remnants of what children are able to do in terms of reading are built from their parents and other people and object around them as they’re read to, spoken to, and taken from place to place to see new things (Solley, 2014). As kids are exposed to more and more their noises quickly turn into intentional comprehensible messages and their scribbling begins to take the form of legible text as they attempt to mimic the language(s) they’re exposed to daily.
Reading always became tiresome to me. We had a reading block in class everyday. The reading block was to make us read fifteen minutes straight a day. Ms. Peshca, my seventh grade teacher, ensured that the class would read. I never read the books until we started reading The Hunger Games.
I would implement read-alouds for the classroom because I noticed that there were issues going on in the classroom that a read-aloud could have helped spark conversations and the class could have had the opportunity to fix the issues. For example, there are several students in my class that required additional assistance when completing an assignment but when I tried to help them by asking thought-provoking questions and guiding them they would become extremely frustrated and say “I do not know, just tell me.” I had a few students who would get angry if their art project was not perfect. I had a student who was devastated when I made a correction on his paper because he automatically thought it was all wrong, and I had a student who felt
Reading and writing is a key part of everyone’s life. There has been some encouraging levels of reading development in primary school assessments. According to the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy report (2015), 95.5% of students achieve at or above the national minimum standard of reading. It is important to know effective ways to teach reading so children can become active problem solvers to enable them to read for meaning or for fun. Over the years, there has been a big amount of research into the most effective ways to teach reading skills to students. There are some systematically taught key skills and strategies that help achieve these levels of reading. Some of these skills include phonological awareness, phonemic awareness,
According to Temple et. Al, there are components for reading. “Reading is the act of getting meaning from a written text.” (Temple & Ogle & Crawford & Freppon, 2005, p.7) There are steps to learn to read; first step is “word recognition.” This activity is that readers recognize letters and words. Next step is “phonemes” which is the smallest sounds in language. Readers who in “phonemic awareness” are able to know how to make sounds with letters. In “comprehension” step, readers are able to understand what they are reading. They can improve reading ability by expanding knowledge of vocabulary. If they can understand words faster than previous time and accurately, they are on “reading fluency” step. The last step, which is “interpretation” or also known as “critical reading”, is a time when they are able to understand author’s thought and mind by reading their words and arguments. National Reading Panel categorized literacy by areas of alphabetic, fluency, comprehension, teacher education and reading instruction, computer technology, and reading instruction. Alphabetic includes
My reason for this is so the student would be able to sound out the words or use context clue by looking at the pictures that the book provided. I pulled one student aside where it was quite and no distractions. I instructed the student to use her finger from left to right as she reads the sentence on each page. She mastered this very well. As she was reading through the story and came across a word she didn’t know, I noticed that she would look at the picture and then say the word. I would then tell her to sound out the word so she would actually read the word and not just guess by the picture. There were a few times where I had to help her sound out a few words from time to time. As she was reading I noticed that some of her pronunciation was a bit off. You could definitely tell that she was born and raised in the south. Unfortunately, the student picked up some bad habits of using the wrong pronunciation and it has affect her the way she
readers: A perspective for research and intervention ―[Electronic version]. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11(4), 289-312.
“The single most important activity for building knowledge for their eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children,” a report from 1985 by the commission
Good reading skills are very important in learning languages. Reading improves spelling because as students learn to sound out letters and words, spelling comes easier. It helps to expand the vocabulary, since the best way to acquire a large vocabulary is to read. Students learn new words as they read and put them in their mind for later use. . They also unconsciously absorb the information about things like how to structure the sentences, how words are used in different contexts, and it gives a better understanding of the word usage and definitions than the cold facts of a dictionary. It improves a person’s vocabulary and knowledge without the person even knowing it. Even if students do not understand every word, they will hear new sounds, words and phrases which they can then try out, copying what they have heard. They can comprehend ideas, follow arguments and detect implications. Reading texts also provide good models for English writing. Krashen (2004) found that reading is extremely important in learning English, since it is the only way to “become a good reader, develop a good writing style, an adequate vocabulary, advanced grammar” and the only way to “become a good speller”.