A Case Study of an Older Disabled Reader

Morris & Gaffney's (in press) article, "Building Reading Fluency in a Disabled Middle-School Reader" details the work done with a rising 8th grader at Appalachian State University's Reading Clinic over the course of a calendar year.

Who is Luke?
Luke is a middle-schooler, a rising 8th grader, who reads at the rate of a 2nd grader.  He lacks fluency and speed. 

• Exogenous Factors:  moved from another state in 5th grade
• Endogenous Factors:  ADD, seizure disorders; both controlled by medications
• Reading History:
• at 5th grade, read at late first grade level
• had difficulty in decoding/read at a slow rate
• after working int he Wilson Reading program, his decoding had greatly improved by the end of 6th.
• However, rate remained slow.
• He currently reads at a 3rd-4th grade level with a significant deficit in reading fluency.

Luke's Intervention--Focusing on Fluency

• Using his interests (Civil War, WW II, Civil rights, & Greek mythology), the authors created a 1 hour lesson plan to target his weakest area--fluency.  The lesson plan was as follows:

1.  Check Luke's Homework.  Luke was assigned tape-recorder reading (6-8 pages of a book audio-taped by the tutor) at instructional level to read each night.  At the end of each page, he stopped the recorder and re-read the page.  At the end of the chapter, he practiced the first 2-3 pages for a homework check the next day, which consisted of him reading 2 minutes orally from a selected passage.  His words correct per minute (WCPM) were charted.
2.  Guided Reading.  At his instructional level, Luke and his partner took turns reading.  He read 1 1/2 to 2 pages and then the tutor read, which gave him a fluent model and helped him build reading stamina.  Stauffer's Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) was used to monitor comprehension in an on-going manner.
3.  Repeated Readings.  Luke read 300 word passages that he had already read as guided reading.  He read as many words as he could for 2 minutes, charted his WCPM, reread, and charted again.  This routine was repeated the next day as he reread the passage for the 3rd and 4th time.  After the 4th re-reading, Luke began the process with a new text from guided reading.
4. Tutor Read-Aloud (last 7-10 minutes).  The tutor read-aloud from an instructional level text.  In the fall, this was incorporated with the homework.  The tutor read-aloud from the book Luke used for tape-recorder readings. 

The intervention lasted from the summer of 2008 until the spring of 2009.  The summer intervention was 4 weeks in length, Monday-Friday, and he received intervention for a total of 13 hours.  In the fall, the intervention was for one hour, two days a week, for a total of 18 hours.  In the spring, I assume he had the same schedule as in the fall, and he had a total of 16 hours of intervention.  For the year, he received 47 hours of tutoring.

Findings.
Although Luke experienced a 25 words per minute rate increase in his reading of connected text, his rate in reading isolated words, as shown on the Word Recognition in Isolation (WRI) measure (link for answer sheets; link for summary sheet), did not improve.  The authors explain the discrepancy by arguing that sight vocabulary does not necessarily determine fluency; that, "in addition to sight vocabulary [there was another factor]that contributed to Luke's improvement in reading fluency" (p. 15) and that factor was phrasing.  Luke learned to read words in phrases faster.

Connections to Previous Readings. 
The use of repeated readings (1979) as a fluency intervention is directly from Samuels and LaBerge's Automaticity Theory.  Also, this intervention is supported by Adam's (1990) model of reading in that he performed better on connected text--when all 4 processors had a role.  On isolated words, the context processor is defunct.

The Lukes in My Classes.
As a high school English/Reading/ELL teacher, I teach Lukes everyday.  Most of my students read between a 3rd-5th grade level, and because their rates are slow, it is hard to pin down their exact instructional reading level on an IRI.  If their rates were a bit higher, they would fall into the higher instructional level.  I think what happens is that these are students who have gotten off-track.  They finally get back on-track and pick up word-decoding.  However, they lack the routine practice of reading (for whatever reason--they hate it, poor readers actually read less at school, etc.), so they lack automaticity and fluency.  Luke's intervention is nearly identical to the intervention I instituted last semester in my reading classes except that we met for 90 minutes a day for 90 days.  The students loved the repeated readings (I had them do these in pairs--with more fluent readers so that they had a fluent model), and this practice significantly improved their fluency.  Also, many of my students have a mixture of endogenous and exogenous factors that contribute to their reading difficulties, including factors such as frequent moves, interrupted schooling, medical conditions like ADHD, and so forth.