Category Archives: fluency

When my first grader reads aloud he plows right through periods as if they don’t exist. When I ask him about what he just read, he has only a vague idea. How do I help him?

Posted on October 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

It sounds like your son might be having a fluency problem. Fluency is one of the four components of reading and involves three skills:

Accuracy—decoding the words to pronounce each one correctly.

Speed—reading at a pace which is fast enough to connect words into ideas.

Prosody—reading with expression so that the words and sentences sound meaningful.

Assuring he can pronounce most written words properly is the first step. Since you don’t mention pronunciation problems, I assume he can decode just fine.

Speed is the next consideration. Is he reading at a normal reading pace—not too slowly because he is stumbling over pronunciation, and not too fast because he is racing? From your question, I assume he might be racing and jumbling too many words together to understand them. Insist that he stop at a comma and a period, and if he forgets, stop him and ask him to reread the sentence. Then ask him what it means.

Lastly, listen for the way he reads. Does he raise his voice at the end of a question? Does he change the tone of his voice when the big bad wolf is talking? Does he say some words louder and some words softer to show he understands the meaning behind the words? If he is not doing this, he will have a more difficult time figuring out the meaning because he is leaving out emotion.

One key for you to know that your child is comprehending what he is reading is his use of inflection, that is, altering his voice in tone or pitch. Children who plow through sentences don’t inflect. They are reading too fast to decode and to inflect at the same time.

When a child first learns to read, accuracy is most important. But it sounds like your child is beyond this stage of decoding, at least with the kind of books he is reading.

How can you help him?

Make sure your child is reading books just slightly beyond his level of reading, not books too advanced for him. Does he understand the vocabulary he is reading? Does he understand the topics? If not, comprehension will go down.

Consider reading aloud to him more, modeling inflection. Just because he can read alone is no reason why you should stop reading aloud to him. He still has so much more to learn about reading—vocabulary, for example, and making conversation sound real.

Is he allowed to stop reading when he has finished a certain number of pages? If so, he might be racing in order to end his reading session early. Change your strategy. Ask him to read a certain amount of time no matter how many pages he reads.

Let him know he is going to need to explain what he has read when he is done, and if he can’t explain it, he is going to need to reread it with you. Needing to explain or redo will force him to slow down.

Another possibility is that your child is a high functioning autistic person. People with autism can have high intelligence, but emotions baffle them. Because they cannot “decode” emotions in their everyday lives, they cannot “decode” emotions in books, so stopping for punctuation might add no meaning to what they read. If your child is autistic, early intervention can help. Contact your school counselor or your pediatrician for an evaluation.

But from what you have said, I suspect your son is in a hurry and needs to learn that speed reading without understanding is a waste of his time.

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Posted in English grammar, fluency, methods of teaching reading, reading comprehension, vocabulary

My child is almost four. She wants to learn to read. Where do I begin? Or does it matter?

Posted on October 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

It matters, according to research. You should start with teaching her “the code,” that is, the connection between the sounds of the English language and the letter symbols we use to mean those sounds. Here’s how. (Look for more information on all these ideas in previously published blogs at comicphonics.com.)

First, make sure she can pronounce all 42 sounds of English. Listen to how she pronounces everyday words and make sure she is saying the sounds correctly. Help her with pronunciation.

Then connect sounds with letter symbols, a few at a time. Start with the beginning sounds of a few key words such as the child’s name, m for mom, d for dad, b for baby. Help her to hear those sounds in the beginnings of other words. For example, if you are pouring her milk, ask her what sound milk begins with. Then show her an “m” and explain that is how we show that sound.

Beginning sounds are always the easiest to hear, so focus on them.

Help her to write the initial of her name and a few other meaningful letters.

Since each vowel has many sounds, teach her to associate each vowel with a word and an image that begins with a “short” vowel sound such as apple, egg, igloo, octopus and umbrella. Later, she can compare the vowel sounds in new words to those vowel sounds.

In speaking, start putting letter sounds together to form one-syllable short-vowel (CVC) words she knows, like “cat” and “dog.” When she can hear how words are formed (phonics) by combining sounds, use letter tiles to show her what the combining of sounds in words looks like using letter symbols.

When you are reading stories to her, point out words she might be able to decipher, and help her to sound them out.

When she knows most of her sound – letter matches, she is ready to start reading books which use one-syllable, short-vowel words. Unfortunately, few good ones exist. We at comicphonics.com have written five humorous books for new readers. (See the links to the right of this blog.) Your librarian can point out where other books are shelved, but many labeled “first” readers contain difficult words. Margaret Hillert has written some good beginning books, and so has Dr. Seuss. Good illustrations can help the child figure out the meanings of difficult words, but she will probably need your help as she begins.

Figuring out the code of written English is how a child begins to learn to read. There are lots of commercial methods to do this, but the best I have found is the Explode the Code series. Children find its combination of goofy pictures and sequenced phonics instruction fun.

Later you can focus on other aspects of reading including fluency and comprehension. But the place to begin is demystifying the code by connecting the sounds of our speech to individual letters and pairs of letters, and then combining them to form words.

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Posted in CVC words, early childhood education, fluency, how to make learning fun, letter sounds, methods of teaching reading, phonics, reading comprehension, reading readiness.

Tagged CVC, decoding words, early reader books, letter awareness, vowel sounds

What’s choral reading?

Posted on July 8, 2015 | Leave a comment

Choral reading is reading aloud as a group, much like a choir reads the words and sings them together aloud. It is commonly done in lower grades and in ESL classes for several reasons:

Children who are less skilled readers can listen to the more skilled readers beside them, and can model their reading after their classmates’ reading. In particular, less skilled readers can hear fluency (emphasis of certain words or syllables, pauses for punctuation, speeding up and slowing down) which less skilled readers might read too slowly to use correctly.

Children who stumble over sight words can hear them pronounced and can say them aloud without drawing attention to themselves. ESL students can hear correct inflections and can practice copying them.

Less skilled readers can practice aloud with anonymity, their mistakes or hesitancies masked by the reading of the larger group.

Children who are poky readers, who stumble while trying to decode words, will gain comprehension which they sometimes miss.

Choral reading is fun for children.

Certain kinds of books or readings work well for choral reading.

If a book has a rhyme pattern, or a predictable rhythm, it can be a good choice. A poem or nursery rhyme makes a good choral reading selection.

If the book is short, so that it can be repeated several times in a few minutes, it can be a good choice.

If the book is at the reading level of the less skilled students, it can be a good choice.

If less skilled readers are familiar with the rhyme or story, it can be a good choice.

Working one-on-one with a student, the parent and student can read aloud together from the same page. If the choral reading happens in a classroom, each student should have a copy of the text or be able to see a Big Book which everyone can use. Usually the adult reads first while the students follow along, pointing their fingers at the spoken words. Then the student joins in. The student might feel more comfortable if the adult reads with gusto, drowning out the mistakes of the beginning reader. As the selection is reread, the adult can read less loudly, allowing the child’s voice to be heard. Rereading the selection several times over several days is a good way to help the less skilled reader to remember the words or to figure them out quickly.

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Posted in English as a second language (ESL), fluency, how to make learning fun, methods of teaching reading, reading readiness., reading strategies

Tagged nursery rhymes, reluctant reader

If my child reads slowly, he can pronounce almost all the words correctly, but he understands almost nothing. If he reads faster, he mispronounces many words but he seems to understand a bit. Which do I go for—accuracy or comprehension?

Posted on June 17, 2015 | Leave a comment

Accuracy. But let’s backtrack a little.

At what stage of reading is your son? Is he reading passages matched to his reading level? If a child is plodding laboriously through text, the text is too difficult for his reading level. He is not achieving fluency. I suggest you go back to easy readers which he can read accurately and with understanding in order to give him confidence.

If he is in third grade, for example, you might find some first grade reading for him. Ask your librarian for help. If he can read sight words and CVC words at a good pace, with word accuracy and with overall comprehension, you know he is reading at least at an early first grade level. Gradually increase the reading difficulty. You want to maintain the child’s confidence, so increasing the difficulty level should not happen in a matter of days but rather over weeks or months.

Some problems to listen for:

If a child is stumbling, word to word, he is not phrasing within sentences. For example, all the words in a prepositional phrase go together and should be said as a unit; the subject and it’s modifiers should be said as a unit. Practice reading aloud with you modeling how to say a given sentence, and ask your son to phrase words so that they make sense.

If a child is reading in a flat monotone, his reading lacks inflection. Some languages lack inflection (Korean, for example), and children from that background might feel foolish saying some words louder and some words softer, or saying part of a word louder than the rest of a word. If you can read with inflection, let the child listen to you and then ask him to repeat the words the same way. If you cannot read with inflection, a child can listen and read along to books on tape.

If a child is bulldozing longer words rather than sounding them out, he could have problems with phonics, or be dyslexic, or be an impatient personality. Cover suffixes and prefixes, discuss the root word’s meaning and the meaning of the suffixes and prefixes, and then reassemble the word. Reread the sentence and ask the student what the word means in the context of that sentence.

Some manufacturers have a reading level on the back cover of children’s books. “RL 2.2” for example means reading level second grade, second month. Other books are color coded by the library, and still others show reading level with a lexile score. In my public library, one long wall of books contains easy readers for children learning to read. You might find an author whom your child likes. Ask your librarian for help so that your child is reading at the correct reading level and gaining confidence.

As your child progresses to higher reading levels, he will probably read with less accuracy and at a slower speed unless you actively intervene. Ask him to read aloud. When he pauses or stumbles, let him try to figure out the difficulty himself, but if he can’t, stop him and help him. Perhaps you will notice he doesn’t understand a concept in phonics; or that prefixes or suffixes confuse him; or that he doesn’t know where to make the break in multi-syllable words so he pronounces words wrong; or that a secondary meaning of a common word baffles him. Teach him how to solve his problem. Then let him continue reading that sentence or that paragraph. Now ask him to reread it. If he continues to stumble at the same spot, you know that he needs stronger intervention on a particular skill.

At the end of paragraphs or chapters, it’s important to ask your child what happened (in fiction) or what is the main idea (in nonfiction). If he talks around the idea but cannot nail it, he was focusing on individual words and missing the meaning of sentences or paragraphs. The reading was too hard. If he can retell the story or explain the main idea, he is comfortable at that reading level, and should try a slightly higher reading level.

What I see with many of my students is that they begin to have difficulty with reading once they have mastered the basic rules of phonics. It’s not a decoding problem; it’s a vocabulary problem. As the reading level increases, so do the number of words they don’t understand. It’s not a matter of pronunciation usually; it’s a matter of having no idea what a given word or an idiom means. This is particularly true for ESL students.

That is why I say accuracy is important. If a child cannot read a given word accurately and know what it means, then understanding a sentence or a paragraph—with lots of unknown words—becomes impossible.

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Posted in CVC words, English as a second language (ESL), fluency, methods of teaching reading, phonics, reading comprehension, vocabulary

Tagged build vocabulary to improve reading, reluctant reader, sight words, syllables

My daughter reads fast, but when I ask her to summarize, she can’t explain well. What do I do?

Posted on June 3, 2015 | 2 comments

Occasionally a read-a-holic student will have lower than expected reading grades. The parent is baffled because the child always has a book in her hands and goes through novels voraciously. When I ask such a student to read aloud for me, she shows many of these behaviors:

She doesn’t slow down for commas or stop for periods.

Her sentences merge and keep going for as long as she can read without taking a breath, and when she pauses to breathe, it might be in the middle of a sentence.

She may skip a line of reading when moving from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

When she comes to an unfamiliar vocabulary word, she bulldozes it, pronouncing it any which-way, and continues reading.

Her inflection is flat, like that of an auctioneer.

She does not self-monitor; she doesn’t pause to consider that she didn’t understand what she just read.

When she answers questions about the reading selection, she does not remember important details and she doesn’t take the time to search for them in the selection.

She misses inferences and more subtle figurative language like metaphors.When asked to restate the main idea in a sentence or two, she talks around the subject but doesn’t nail the point the author is making.

What’s going on?

For such a student, speed is the important value. Finish quickly. Move on. (Notice if she is slap-dash about her piano practicing, dressing or cleaning her room. This is a personality trait, not just a reading trait.) In reading, this behavior might develop as she reads novels of her choice. She doesn’t care if she understands every nuance; she would rather understand enough to enjoy the story without slowing down for details.

This kind of reading might work for leisure-time reading, but it doesn’t work for most school reading, especially the kind of reading being tested under the new Common Core Standards. Common Core is trying to break such bad habits by forcing a reader to name the paragraph in which the answer is found, to define a word, to distinguish between fact and opinion, to restate an idea, to infer and to summarize.

What to do to improve fluency and reading comprehension?

Ask your student to read aloud. She will fume because it takes longer to read aloud. But make her do it. Silently read along with her and note the kinds of errors which she is making.

If she is ignoring punctuation, stop her and ask her to reread and pause appropriately. She will hate this, but making this one change is half the battle.

Ask her to use inflection now that she can hear the sentences correctly. Model it if necessary.

If she slides over longer words she doesn’t know, stop her immediately and ask her to sound out the word. If she can’t do it on her own, cover a prefix and a suffix; ask her what the root means, or if she knows another word with that root. Then reassemble the word and pronounce it.

Sometimes it is not the long words which stump students; it is the idioms or the secondary meanings of short, familiar words. Stop your student when she encounters such words to be sure she understands them.

If she skips lines of reading, have her use her finger to keep track, or an opaque book mark.

At the end of a paragraph or a few paragraphs, ask her to explain what she just read. If she has missed something significant, go back and show it to her and together figure out why she missed it.

Many times, ask what the main idea is. If she can’t nail it, have her reread while you point out clues to the overall meaning.

Model self-monitoring by stopping her now and then to take stock of what was read and what to expect next. Let your student hear you talking to yourself about what you just read.

Lastly, let her read her leisure-time reading undisturbed, bad habits and all. You can only fight so many battles; let her win that one small skirmish.

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Posted in Common Core Standards, fluency, methods of teaching reading, reading comprehension, reading strategies, vocabulary

Do you read stories to your children at bedtime?

Posted on May 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

If you do, you are one of a small group of parents. An online survey of more than 1000 US parents shows that one-third of parents read to their young children every night. Half the parents said that their children prefer watching video games or watching TV to reading.

Another survey of 2000 mothers in Britain showed that about 2/3 of mothers read to their children, but only 13% read to their children every night. Parents say stress at the end of the day and lack of time are reasons that they don’t read to their kids. But TV, video games and other distractions also are factors.

Yet reading to children at bedtime can offer so many advantages.

Establishing a bedtime ritual—a bath, brushing teeth, kissing family members good-night, a prayer, and a snuggle with Mom or Dad while they read—is a time-honored way to settle children down and prepare them for sleep.

Children learn fluency by hearing an adult read. They learn to slow down for commas and periods. They learn to change their tone for direct quotes. They learn that certain parts should be read faster or slower, louder or softer, or in a high squeaky voice or a low threatening voice.

In the privacy of the bedroom, parents might feel more inclined to “act” out the words of the book—to be silly or gruff, whiny or sugary. Children sometimes see a different side of their parents during bedtime reading. This can be a great ice breaker between a child and a usually distant parent.

Children learn vocabulary. They can ask, “What does that mean?” and get an immediate answer.

Children learn about setting, plot, character, tension and happy endings. They learn about culture. Especially as children get older, parents can read books to a child which the child isn’t ready to read yet but which the child is quite able to understand.

Children often reveal what they are thinking and feeling during a nighttime read. Snuggled safely with Mom or Dad’s arm around her, a child might open up about her hopes and fears. This is a time for the child to feel protected.

In our next blog we’ll talk about how you can establish bedtime reading if you don’t already do it, or how to improve the experience for you and your child.

The American study was conducted by Macy’s and Reading Is Fundamental in 2013. The British study was conducted by Littlewoods, also in 2013

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Posted in fluency, how to make learning fun, methods of teaching reading

Tagged build vocabulary to improve reading, how to encourage more reading, reluctant reader

What is choral reading?

Posted on December 11, 2014 | Leave a comment

Choral reading is group reading aloud in which a fluent reader serves as a model for students learning to read. It is a reading method frequently used in pre-K to second grade classrooms and in ESL classrooms, but it can also be a good method to teach reading at home.

Here’s how it works:

A fluent reader, usually a teacher, parent or recorded voice, reads a story aloud. The students gather around the teacher who uses a large-sized book whose text is also large. As she reads, she points to each word. Or, if children have their own copies of the text, they point to the words she says with their fingers.
The teacher reads the selection once while the children follow along silently with their eyes on the text.

The teacher reads the selection several more times, each time with students joining in for the words they can say. Usually, with repeated readings, students can read more of the words.

Often the selection is reread the next day or soon after to reinforce the students’ ability to read the selection.

Why do choral reading?

It’s fun. Children love to read aloud when they are one of many voices. Many times the selections have repeated phrases like “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,” or rhymes, which increase the fun.

More skilled readers serve as models for the less skilled students sitting by their sides. The less skilled readers listen not only to their teacher, but to their peers, and they learn from each other.

Less skilled students, who might be embarrassed to read aloud by themselves, feel comfortable as part of the group. Their mistakes either can’t be heard or are ignored. They feel more confident about reading aloud. They also realize that with repeated readings, they can read more words.

ESL students learn proper pronunciation, phrasing and intonation from listening and mimicking the fluent reader.

Dyslexic readers, who often memorize words rather than sound them out, remember better because they are enjoying the reading experience. Their lack of reading ability is less noticeable when they are part of a group.

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Posted in dyslexia, English as a second language (ESL), fluency, how to make learning fun, methods of teaching reading

Tagged early reader books, how to encourage more reading

What does it mean to be literate? Part 2: Details on American achievement on PISA reading tests

Posted on April 25, 2014 | Leave a comment

Results of the every-three-year PISA reading tests (Program for International Student Assessment) were announced on Dec. 3, showing that U.S. 15-year-olds again scored average compared to their peers in 64 other countries.

Eight percent of American students who took the test scored in the top ranges; 17 per cent scored at the baseline low range; most scored at the average range. In the U.S., Massachusetts and Connecticut had more students scoring in the top ranges than did South Korea while Florida scored just a bit below the total U.S. average. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida paid to have more of their students tested so that they could have a representative sample to use to compare their students.

Compare the U.S. scores with those of the best scoring countries:

What does all this mean?

Since the reading testing began in 2000, the U.S. has consistently scored in the average range in years in which comparisons can be made (2000, 2003, 2009 and 2012.

Despite the increase in testing of U.S. students, and despite publicizing the results of those tests, and despite shaking up public education with charter schools and other statewide initiatives, U.S. education is stagnating, according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Why the mediocre showing by U.S. students? Various reasons are proposed, especially the effects of poverty. Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, emphasized the corrosive effects of poverty. The U.S. has one of the highest child poverty rates in the world, double or triple the rate in PISA leading countries such as South Korea, Germany, Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands. Van Roekel called poverty “the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance.”

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Posted in fluency, reading research

Tagged Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), USA worldwide literacy rank

My child is a reluctant reader. How can I encourage him?

Posted on March 12, 2014 | Leave a comment

First, commit to working with your child every day for many months or even years. He will not become an eager reader without your help, or the help of a dedicated tutor who works with him several times a week.

Next, find reading material that your child enjoys. Boys—and most reluctant readers are boys—prefer nonfiction—how an engine works, for example, or how to build a bird house, or sports stories. Nonfiction offers certain pluses: illustrations (photos, charts, and diagrams), subheadings, a separate introduction, and maybe a summary. Tempt your child with a skateboard magazine or a comic book or graphic novels. Find online sites too. Then:

Build on past success. Ask your child to reread material he has mastered, but which he couldn’t read a short time ago. Remind him of his gains.

Introduce new reading material which you suspect your child can read with 90% success. Increase the difficulty level in tiny, tiny increments so the child has a growing feeling of success, not failure.

If a child stumbles through a sentence, focusing on individual words and not on the sentence, repeat the sentence for him with fluency, so he knows what the sentence means.

Stop the child after a passage and ask what it means. Don’t let him move on until he knows the meaning of what he has already read.

Take turns reading. You read one page; he reads one page. Or for older students, you read one paragraph; he reads one paragraph.

Let him read to you without distractions. No TV calling from another room. No cell phone in your hand, or tablet in your lap. No brother on a video game in another room. Give him your undivided attention.

Read to your child—maybe at bedtime?—without any expectation that he will join in. Let him enjoy reading as pure entertainment.

If he has only one reading strategy—such as guessing at a word—model other strategies.

Cover part of the word to show a part he can read. Reveal more of the word.

Point out prefixes and suffixes, and cover them so the child can see the basic word unit.

Ask him to read a sentence leaving out a difficult word. Together discuss what that word might mean.

Ask him if a word looks like any other word he knows. Talk about word families or rhyming words which often sound the same.

If the child’s attention span is short, have more reading sessions but limit their time, and use a timer so the child can monitor how long the reading session will go on.

Praise his efforts. Point out successes like
- Knowing a word he missed in the past.
- Sounding out a word.
- Pronouncing a word using correct syllable breaks.
- Putting inflection into his reading.

Talk to your child’s teacher. She might know appropriate reading materials to recommend. She can keep you abreast of reading skills the class is working on so you can work on them at home. She will carefully watch your child for reading problems or successes if she knows you are working with him too.

My son was a reluctant reader, way behind at the end of first grade. I consulted an expert and followed his advice. I worked with my son for at least a half hour every day over summer vacation, asking him to read lists of words (for phonics) and easy reading books (for comprehension). He hated it. Every session was a struggle. Yet he started second grade reading on grade level and was an eager reader after that. By sixth grade he was devouring a chapter book a week, anticipating the publication dates of books in series he enjoyed.

The sooner you can intervene with a reluctant reader, the more likely you are of success. Analyze your kindergartener’s or first grader’s reading habits. If he is a reluctant reader, commit yourself to working with him now, before he becomes discouraged or evasive. –Mrs. K