Strategies to Promote Fluency
When reading stories aloud to children we want to model fluent and expressive reading for children and develop their comprehension of the stories. We also want to provide opportunities for children to practice fluent and expressive reading in developmentally appropriate ways. Below are strategies for actively engaging children in reading fluently and expressively and developing comprehension.
Echo reading
Echo reading is when the teacher models reading a line expressively, and the students repeat it after the teacher. The teacher reads a line, and the students repeat it, echoing the teacher. Therefore, this reading approach is called “echo reading.” Echo reading develops fluency as the teacher models reading with expression for the students.
It is the most scaffolded approach for guiding the cadence (musicality of the language) of the language and developing reading fluency. Every language has a different rhythm and cadence, with unique intonation and stress patterns. Echo reading is beneficial for English Language Learners to familiarize them with the pronunciation of words and the intonation/stress patterns of the language.
To implement echo reading, the teacher generally reads the text, pointing to each word in the line to reinforce the one-to-one correspondence between the written and spoken words, and has the children repeat. Shared reading experiences such as echo reading also reinforce the concepts of print and sight-word recognition for young learners.
Sometimes, the teacher claps and sways to the rhythm while reading a sentence, and the children repeat each sentence while copying her movements. Having the children repeat just by listening without the print has the benefit of developing phonological awareness and listening skills. Each teacher needs to consider their own contextual needs and make their own judgment calls about how to implement a particular strategy.
Choral reading
Choral reading is when the teacher and student read together in chorus. To do that, the teacher must first model reading and then have the printed text available at each student’s desk.
You can use poems in reading practice sessions to develop fluency. Have the students pair up with one another to practice choral reading together, thereby scaffolding each other’s reading attempts, then bring the whole group together for a class choral reading.
Another technique is to have the students join at repeated refrains in a book. For example, in the book 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, the children can read in unison: “No More monkeys jumping on the bed!” Choral reading makes for an enjoyable reading experience.
Repeated reading
Repeated reading builds fluency. Children’s favorite books make the best texts for repeated reading experiences. Each time the child reads it, they may notice something they didn’t see before, enhancing their comprehension. Repeated reading also improves sight-word recognition and oral reading skills. Ensure that your students have access to easy books during independent reading time. They need consistent independent-reading time, as it allows exploring books based on their interests while re-reading their favorite books for enjoyment develops their fluency.
Repeated reading enhances children’s confidence in reading. The children may record reading their favorite book on Flipgrid after a few repeated reading sessions with peers or family. Encourage them to read to their teddy bear (or plush toy), siblings, peers, guardians, and relatives.
Lack of access to books can be addressed by various initiatives such as book deserts through various statewide programs in which you may get involved. The disparity in book access can be addressed by neighborhood little-library initiatives. Bring a book, take home a book, and spread community and home literacies!
Recorded reading
Recorded reading materials can be listened to anytime and anywhere as long as children can access a device. There are several celebrity read-aloud programs available. Storyline online is a platform that offers virtual read-aloud by celebrities. They update their collection of books periodically to attract kids. There are recorded reading videos by characters from children’s TV shows on the Internet.
Read-aloud (reading to students)
Read-aloud provides modeling for fluent, expressive reading while instilling joy and comfort in the reading experience. Children develop listening comprehension while listening to read aloud. Read-aloud has innumerable socio-emotional and cognitive benefits. This NPR article and podcast provide parents with guidance about making reading aloud to their kids a warm, bonding experience while making them better readers.
Reading aloud enhances phonemic awareness, one of the literacy building blocks in young children. Teachers and guardians model expressive reading while reading aloud and facilitate building children’s vocabulary. Additionally, reading aloud provides access to a text that children might not be able to read on their own and helps them process life and difficult issues through dialogic conversations. With the help of adults, children negotiate meaning. Further, reading aloud builds children’s background knowledge. Through think-aloud and pertinent thought-provoking questions, read-aloud scaffold meaning-making. This PBS article provides the beneficial effects of reading aloud.
Reading aloud involves planning and preparation. First, consider how you would like to introduce the book, author, and illustrator: how would you connect the children’s prior knowledge to the topic? At what points would you ask strategic think-aloud questions without interrupting the story? What are some relevant questions focused on predicting, visualizing, monitoring comprehension, summarizing, and/or evaluating? What story elements (characters, setting, plot, and theme) would you discuss and how? How would you make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections? You may choose to discuss certain aspects of the book in depth depending on the cognitive and affective development of the children.
Shared reading (reading with students)
As the name suggests, shared reading involves a reader sharing a text with an audience. A teacher, for example, reads from a “big book.” In PreK-2, the children sit on a rug while the teacher reads and points at words with a pointer. Pointing demonstrates the one-to-one correspondence of written and spoken words. Shared reading also improves students’ sight-word recognition and concepts about print, such as reading moves from left to right and return sweep to the left to continue reading.
Shared reading builds fluency by modeling expressive reading with voice changes for different characters. It cultivates joy from reading by making it a pleasurable experience where children participate by chiming in at certain spots.
It also supports story comprehension by building a schema for the story structure, with beginning, middle, and end, highlighting the story elements of character, setting, plot, and theme through strategic, thought-provoking questions.
Independent reading (reading by students)
Independent reading by students supports fluency. Motivation plays a huge role in creating independent readers. The students can be motivated by bringing in a variety of texts based on their interests and providing them with choices in reading and writing. There is no follow-up activity or book report to be written on books the children read. Children engage in independent reading for fun and enjoyment. Research (Cunningham & Allington, 2016) shows that the significant motivators of students for reading are teachers’ read-aloud and the students having an independent reading time with books of their own choice. Having multiple copies of books the class has read repeatedly allows the children opportunities to read the books on their own during centers
The purpose of independent reading is the enjoyment of the text. Students should get a consistent independent reading time of at least 20 minutes each day. Teachers must consider how to implement independent reading in their classrooms, including logistics such as when students would select their books for the independent-reading time. What procedures are there already in place to make independent-reading time efficient?
Rasinski (2003) and (Rasinski & Padak, 2013) recommend developing fluency through fluency-development lessons with the following instructional routine. This routine can be completed within 15-20 minutes:
- Read aloud a short poem or interesting passage several times. Help the children comprehend difficult words during the discussion. Teachers can write the words to a poem on tagboard or on sentence strips and display the poem in a pocket chart.
- Do a choral reading of the poem or passage as a class several times, assigning different parts for the children to take. The children should have copies of the text. The children can put these in folders and have poetry notebook which they can read during free choice times. The children may illustrate the text.
- Do at least three partner readings of the poem or passage, taking turns reading.
- Ask for volunteers to read the poem or passage to the whole class.
- The children take home the text. They are encouraged to share their reading with a parent or guardian. If the children make poetry notebooks, they can bring the notebooks home to share with their families and bring them back to continuing filling with new poems.
Strategies to Promote Comprehension
Early print awareness reflects children’s understanding that print conveys meaning as they explore it in their environment with parents and guardians. Toddlers and preschoolers depend on social clues and physical context to read print (Goodman, 1986). Gradually, they learn directionality, letter names, and the correspondence between letters and sounds to make meaning of the written symbols and words.
Adults play a considerable role in promoting understanding of the text by reading aloud and having children interact with the print in their daily lives. Children develop a story schema through read-aloud with a beginning, middle, and end. They also get exposed to different text structures and features through consistent, shared reading experiences. Furthermore, read-aloud develops vocabulary and prior knowledge to enhance linguistic comprehension.
Guardians and teachers can promote reading comprehension by:
- Reading a variety of narrative and expository texts aloud.
- Choosing books that introduce children to unfamiliar topics, complex syntax, and sophisticated words (Paratore et al., 2011).
- Encouraging children to elaborate, clarify, and reason as they discuss stories (dialogic reading).
- Engaging children in various reading experiences, such as independent reading, shared reading, guided reading, and read-aloud.
- Making consistent time for a daily read-aloud or shared reading and independent reading.
- Building children’s vocabulary by exploring word meanings: Have children illustrate the vocabulary (sketch to stretch), write synonyms, antonyms, and a sentence, or draw a graphic organizer like the Frayer model [PDF]. The Frayer model can be modified to have a combination of words and pictures. Children can also explore vocabulary in their surroundings. Understanding vocabulary supports children’s comprehension.
Understanding Narrative Text Elements
Teachers can help students develop comprehension by helping them to understand different types of texts (narrative and informational), story elements, and text features.
Narrative texts have a story structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Narrative texts have the following story elements:
Setting
Setting indicates when and where a story takes place. To develop an understanding of the setting, explore how the illustrations and word choices in the story contribute to the feeling of the place and time.
Characters
There are major and minor characters in a story. Students can analyze and describe the traits or qualities of the characters through their appearance, words, and actions; they can compare the characters using a Venn diagram or examine how the characters evolved from the beginning to end in longer texts such as chapter books.
Plot
The plot involves the problem, sequence of events, and solution of the story. A plot diagram looks like a horizontal line where the story is introduced. Then the problem is introduced, followed by an escalation of conflict, also known as the sequence of events, until the climax of the action. Finally, the graph looks like a downhill line, representing the release of tension as the problem is resolved. There may be person-to-person conflict, person-to-society conflict, person-to-self conflict, or person-to-nature conflict. Story mapping helps in developing an understanding of the plot.
Theme
Theme indicates the main idea. Themes are generally written as sentences. For example, “slow and steady wins the race.” Have your students identify the story’s main idea while guiding them with questions.
Comprehension Strategies for Narrative Texts
Strategies for helping students comprehend texts include reviewing, predicting, activating prior knowledge, setting a purpose, think-aloud, visualizing, inferring, summarizing, and evaluating.
Before Reading
Before reading the story, the book is introduced through the 4 Ps: Preview, Prior knowledge, Prediction, and Purpose.
- Preview: Previewing consists of examining the title, author, and illustrator and taking a picture walk through the book. It can be done with chapter books as well as picturebooks.
- Prior knowledge: Students are encouraged to think about the book’s topic through think-aloud or a question.
- Prediction: To promote active reading, the students are asked to predict something related to the book based on their preview.
- Purpose: Set the purpose of their reading the text. Generally, it is to find information based on the reader’s prediction.
While Reading
While reading, the students are encouraged to think about the 5 W’s and H’s: What, Where, When, Why, Who, and How? The placing of strategic questions at points throughout the book will help the children to comprehend the story. The Iowa Reading Research Center recommends using the CROWD+HS questions and PEER+PA dialogue to encourage dialogic reading to promote reading comprehension and oral language development.
Throughout the story, active readers make predictions, they think aloud (“I wonder…, I think…, I feel…”), visualize (“I can vividly see the action happening through the use of descriptive language by the author”), self-monitor (“I don’t understand why…”), summarize (“So far in the story…”), and evaluate (“My favorite part is…”). The ability to infer develops over time as children gain experience with reading and learn to make connections using their background knowledge and information from the text to draw conclusions.
After Reading
We make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections during and after reading. Students can summarize stories by story mapping to showcase their understanding.
Story Mapping
Story mapping is a visual representation of the various elements of a story. Different graphic organizers can be explored online, such as concept maps, story maps, and others. The elements to consider when mapping the story are setting, characters, problem, sequence of events, solution, and theme (main idea).
Compare and Contrast
Teachers and students may use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast characters from the same book or different books. This allows them to examine the similarities and differences between the characters.
Writing a Bilingual Story.
Dual-language learners can write with Rebus (a combination of words and pictures) or a bilingual story using two languages.
Retelling Using Bob Prost and Kylene Beers’ BHH Framework (2017)
Developing the skill to retell stories after hearing them in read-aloud, shared-reading experiences, or guided-reading times reinforces the students’ grasp of the beginning-middle-end structure of stories. Retelling skills can be improved over time and made more specific. BHH stands for:
- What is in the Book?
- What is in your Head?
- What did you take to Heart? (The personal connections you made with the story.)
Comprehension Strategies for Informational Texts
Informational text is text that is nonfiction. Newspapers, encyclopedias, and nonfiction books are examples of informational text. The comprehension strategies for informational text are similar to those for narrative text in terms of visualizing, summarizing, and evaluating information. The text features of informational text and content-specific vocabulary require close reading, figuring out or looking up vocabulary words, and paying attention to tables, captions, and headings.
Sketch noting and various graphic organizers can be used to help visualize the information. T-charts and double-entry journals are also great ways to organize the information, with significant points on the left and associated connections on the right. Tree diagrams (Cunningham & Allington, 2016) can summarize the text, with the trunk, branches, and twigs representing the main topic, subtopics, and examples/details.
Scavenger hunts and other gamified learning activities with incentives are excellent methods for comprehending informational text.
The Second Life uses a simulation platform to teach content areas, and Wondropolis uses children’s natural curiosity to teach informational text in a multimodal manner. Newsela provides articles on various informational texts, and you may modify the text difficulty by adjusting for the grade level.
Cunningham and Allington (2016) suggest a “Guess Yes or No,” or “confirm or correct” framework where students first predict and then read to check their predictions. False predictions are corrected with the correct information. For this activity, students can be given anywhere from 10-15 informational statements to make predictions about, read, confirm, or correct.
References
Beers, K. & Probst, B. (2017). Disrupting thinking: Why how we read matters. Scholastic.
Cunningham, P. and Allington, R. (2016). Classrooms that work: They can all read and write. Pearson.
Goodman, Y. (1986). Children coming to know literacy. In W. Teale & E. Sulzby (Eds.). Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading (pp. 1-14). Ablex.
Paratore, J. R., Cassano, C. M., & Schickedanz, J. A. (2011). Supporting early (and later) literacy development at home and at school: The long view. In M.L. Kamil, P.D. Pearson, E. B. Moje & P.P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (Vol. IV, pp. 107-135). Routledge.
Rasinski, T. V. (2003). The fluent reader. Scholastic.
Rasinski, T. V., & Padak, N. D. (2013). From phonics to fluency (3rd edition). Allyn & Bacon.
