Research Reports

Perfetti, C., and Hogaboam, T. (1975). Relationship between single word decoding and reading comprehension skill. Journal of Educational Psychology, 67, 4, 461-469.

In this study, Perfetti and Hogaboam test LaBerge and Samuels's (1974) Automaticity Theory and the premise that decoding must be automatic in order to free attention for higher order thinking skills such as comprehension because we have limited attentional resources (working memory).  In this study, the authors wanted to know if decoding deficiencies were sufficient to cause comprehension differences between good and poor readers or if vocabulary knowledge was also a necessary condition.  The dependent variable in this study was reading comprehension (skilled vs. less skilled); the independent variable was vocalization latency, and the control variable was word knowledge.

32 third graders and 32 fifth graders (mainly working class and white) from an urban area (Pittsburgh) were tested both on word recognition and word meaning.  A set of high frequency words, low frequency words, and pseudo words were flashed to participants for as long as it took until they began to vocalize a response.  Immediately following this task, participants were also given a multiple-choice vocabulary test on the real words.  The word lists differed between grade levels, limiting the comparisons that could be made between the two.

 However, at both grade levels, the most skilled readers had the lowest vocalization latency on each type of word (they were able to read all words the fastest).  Also, at each grade level, the high frequency words were read faster than the low frequency words which were read faster than non-words.  At each grade level, the biggest difference between the skilled and less skilled readers was most evident on the pseudo-words.  The skilled readers are able to read low frequency and non words faster than less skilled, demonstrating that they have stronger decoding skills, which frees up attentional resources for comprehension.  Because ALL words analyzed were those whose meaning each participant knew, the authors were able to rule out knowing a word's meaning as contributing to the speed with which the word was read. 

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Ehri, L. C. & Wilce, L. S. (1979). The mnemonic value of orthography among beginning readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 1, 26-40.

To test her amalgamation theory (the idea that readers combine the syntactic, phonological, and semantic identities of words--acquired through oral language--with the orthographic identities of words once they begin to read, providing a mnemonic aid to word retrieval) Ehri  & Wilce conducted an experiment to test whether spelling can help participants learn nonsense words.

The independent variables in this study were grade (1st vs. 2nd), sex (male vs. female), and type of learning task (squiggle vs. initial letter vs. initial letter + misspelling, vs. initial letter + correct spelling).  The dependent variable was the number of trials required to learn the sounds on the paired associated learning task.  The control variable was word knowledge, controlled by the use of nonsense words.  Also, each set of nonsense words (4) was shown in different conditions 1st across all participants to ensure that results wouldn't be related to one set of words being more easily learned in general or more easily learned under a specific condition. 

In this study, n =48.  There were 24 1st graders and 24 2nd graders, consisting of 24 males and 24 females.

Each participant was shown each set consisting of 4 of non-words under 1 each of the following conditions:  A.  Squiggle.  They were shown a squiggle while hearing a non-word.  B.  Initial Letter.  They were shown the initial letter while hearing a non-word.  C.  Initial Letter + Misspelling.  They were shown the initial letter with the word spelled incorrectly while hearing the non-word. D. Initial Letter + Correct Spelling.  They were shown the initial letter and the correct spelling of the word while hearing the non-word.  In conditions C and D, attention was drawn only to the initial letter, although the spelling appeared on the card.  When students were tested on the words in conditions C and D, only the initial letters were presented.

In each condition, subjects were given 5 seconds to recall the nonsense word when presented with the visual cue (squiggle or initial letter).  If they could not produce the word correctly, they were provided it.  In each condition, subjects attempted to match the sound with the visual up to 15 times.  If participants could correctly match all 4 non-words to the corresponding visual cue 2 times successively, the task was terminated and participants followed the same procedures in the next condition.

ANOVA was used to analyze the data, and there was a significant difference in the time it took a subject to learn non-words when correct spellings were presented in conjunction with initial consonants as compared to the time it took in other conditions (p<.01).  Sounds paired with correct spellings were learned significantly faster than those paired with only initial letters, which were recalled significantly better than those paired with squiggles or misspellings.  Interestingly, students learned the non-words taught with squiggles and misspellings at virtually the same rate, which has important implications about the importance of correct spellings.

Results indicate that Word Amalgamation Theory has credence, that print (via the letters) is glued to sound and stored in memory in the form of words, automatizing the word identification process.  In other words, spelling and sound work together to aid word recognition.





West, R.F., & K.E. Stanovich (1978).  Automatic contextual facilitation in readers of three ages. Child Development, 49; 3 p717-27.


West and Stanovich's (1978) "Automatic Contextual Facilitation in Readers of Three Ages" tested the effects context had on rate.  The Independent Variables (IV) were ages (reading levels, of which there were 3) and context conditions, of which there were 3. The dependent variable (DV) was rate.  Particpants were 4th graders, 6th graders, and college students.  The design was a 3 X 3 mixed design, between subjects, post-test only.  The context conditions were within-subjects, meaning that each participant received each condition:  that of no context, that of congruous context, and that of incongruous context.  The treatment order was randomized.  The independent variable, age (reading level) was significant.  As students got older, their reading times across all context conditions were faster.  They also found that there was a clear difference in rate between context conditions at grades 4 and 6.  However, for adults, this context condition was not significant.  There was also an interaction effect:  within each context condition, younger children read significantly slower.  They found a significantly negative correlation between the skill of the reader and the use of the context--the better reader used context less because their word recognition skills were automatized. They found that older readers read a target word in 250 milliseconds regardless of context, whereas a 4th grade reader read a target word in an incongruous context in 640 ms.  They developed the Context Facilitation Index to determine reading rates in the different context conditions. These findings are in contrast to Goodman's theory that good readers use context clues.

Running head: Peer-Assisted Repeated Readings and ELLs’ Fluency

IRB Approval Needed

THE EFFECTS OF PEER-ASSISTED REPEATED READINGS (RR) ON SECONDARY ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ (ELLS’) READING FLUENCY

Bobbi Faulkner

Appalachian State University

Problem Statement:

Introduction to Context:  Reading is a complicated process, one that entails a complex interplay of skills (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985).  Children acquire spoken language through immersion:  they hear a language so often, and they are able to figure out, through a rich context of objects, voice intonations, body language, and trial and error, which words carry which meanings and how to put the words together to form coherent thoughts and speech (Pinker, 1994).  Children learn to speak both out of need and a desire to interact with their environments (Pinker).  Though the process can be much more complicated for learners of a foreign language, it works essentially the same way, although it may require much more time and more exposures to the language for acquisition to occur (Cummins, 1979).

 Whereas speaking appears to be an innate human act, reading does not (Pinker, 1994).  It takes more than submersion in text to acquire reading.  First language speakers of English, also known as native speakers, can struggle when learning to read, even if they have no mental handicaps or learning disabilities (Doughty & Long, 2003).  Learning to read for English Language Learners, (ELLs), also known as English as a Second Language (ESL) students, Limited English Proficient (LEP), Second Language learners (L2), Foreign Language learners (FL), is complicated even more by such variables as years spent in the United States, whether or not literacy was achieved in the native language, how much English is spoken in their homes and communities, what students’ first language (L1) is and how much negative and positive transfer occurs between that language and English. 

Problem Statement: Fluency is the end goal of reading proficiency (Willcutt, 2004).  Struggling readers most often lack this fluency, resulting in limited comprehension of text (National Reading Panel, 2000). ELLs bring additional deficits to the table, primarily resulting from having been exposed to far less spoken English over time, making access to syntactic structures, phrasing, and vocabulary found in text all the more difficult (Chall, 1996). Because the ELL population is growing quickly, from 2 million students in 1993 to 1994 to 3 million students in 1999-2000, to 3. 8 million in 2003-2004, accounting for 11% of all students in US schools (US Dept. of Education, 2004) it is imperative that educators understand methods that help them attain reading fluency. The method of repeated readings, developed by Samuels (1979) is one such intervention that has worked consistently with native, elementary English speakers (Allington, 2009; Dowhower, 1987;  Hiebert, 2006; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; NICHD, 2000; Pikulski, 2006; Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985; Samuels, 1979; Therrien, 2004; Topping, 2006; Young, Bowers, & Mackinnon, 1996) .  RR has also been studied on a much more limited basis with secondary native speakers of English and has also been shown to improve their fluency (Pinnell et al., 1995; Rasinski et al., 2005; Valleley & Shriver, 2003; Wexler et al., 2008).  The few studies that have been done using RR as a fluency intervention with ELL students have been promising (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007; Taguchi, Gorsuch, & Sasamoto, 2006; Willcutt, 2004), although no studies have been done utilizing peer-assisted repeated reading with this population and no studies were conducted specifically with ELL high school students in the United States.

Operational Definitions of Key Terms:

Fluency: For the purpose of this study, a comprehensive definition of the construct of fluency will be utilized.  Reading fluency is a “developmental process that refers to efficient, effective decoding skills that permit a reader to comprehend text.  There is a reciprocal relationship between decoding and comprehension.  Fluency is manifested in accurate, rapid, expressive oral reading and is applied during, and makes possible, silent-reading comprehension” (Pikulski, 2006, p. 73).

English Language Learners:  English Language Learners are students who have reported that a second language is spoken in the home at the time of school enrollment.  To be considered an English Language Learner, these students also have to score below the fluent level across all four tested domains (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) on the current standardized test, the WIDA ACESS test.  A student who performs below level 6 on any of these domains is considered to be non-fluent and is therefore served in the Limited English Proficiency (LEP) program. Only students scoring below a level 3 in the domain of reading will receive this treatment as only these students will be placed in the reading course.

Peer-assisted Repeated Readings:  For the purpose of this study, peer-assisted repeated readings refers to the method of fluency intervention involving the student working with a peer. The student will select a passage in a self-selected, instructional level text, count the words in that passage, and underline words he/she doesn’t know the meaning or pronunciation of, and the peer or circulating teacher or TA will discuss those words with the student.  Prior to reading, based on the student’s typical reading rate, the student and peer will determine a WCPM (words correct per minute) criterion, and the student will read the passage repeatedly (for one minute each time) until this criterion is met.  Then, the student will read the passage once, while the teacher times the performance and tracks accuracy and fluency.   The peer charts the WCPM after each rereading.  When criterion is reached, the re-reading ends.

Rationale:  This study will benefit educators of ELLs, ELLs themselves, as well as scholars in the field of reading and language acquisition. It is a necessary study because prior studies have failed to focus on this specific population.  The studies that have been conducted with RR and ELLs have been done with either elementary students (Willcutt, 2004), or college students in other countries (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007; Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, and Gorsuch (2004).  Furthermore, the studies with college students lacked control groups of students engaged in extensive reading during the same time students did repeated reading, and both of these studies also involved students reading material that was too difficult for them, which violates a basic tenet of RR, that the re-read text be at a student’s instructional reading level. Finally, if the peer-assisted model proves viable, it will be an added tool in the arsenal of high school reading teachers who need to manage several small groups of students at once. The purpose of this study is to see how peer-assisted repeated readings affect the reading fluency of secondary ELLs because there is a dearth of such research.  The literature leads me to propose that ELLs receiving RR intervention will have improved fluency, as measured by word accuracy, rate, and comprehension.

Literature Review:

Fluency:  A History

   In order to understand what fluency is, and the controversy surrounding its meaning, it is necessary to review how fluency has been viewed historically.  It is not a new construct; in fact, in colonial times, oral-reading fluency was considered the end goal of reading, perhaps because there were few books in the home and not everyone knew how to read (Hyatt, 1943; Rasinski, 2006; Smith, 2002).  Therefore, the reading done at the time was oral, and the focus in schools was placed on expressive oral reading (Hyatt, 1943; Rasinski, 2006).  During the nineteenth century, a recitation method of reading instruction (termed the story method in the beginning of the 20^th century) focusing on elocution, was used (Hoffman, 1987; Rasinski, 2006).  According to Hoffman, fluency had become such a part of reading instruction that by the end of the 19^th century, philosopher William James (1892) wrote “the teacher’s success or failure in teaching reading is based, so far as the public estimate is concerned, upon the oral reading method” (p. 422, as quoted in Rasinski, p. 6).

   At the turn on the 20^th century, the pendulum had begun to swing.  Oral reading fell out of favor as educators in Europe and the US began questioning the emphasis placed on oral reading.  These scholars argued that using oral-reading to teach reading overemphasized “pronunciation, emphasis, inflection, and force” (Hyatt, 1943, p. 27, as quoted in Rasinski, 2006, p. 7) and didn’t focus enough on comprehension. In 1891, Horace Mann felt that the reading instruction of the time period was more an “action of the organs of speech” instead of an “exercise of the mind in thinking and feeling” and said that “more than eleven-twelfths of all the children in reading classes do not understand the meaning for the words they read” (as quoted in Rasinski, p. 7).  Mann led the attack on reading instruction too focused on elocution.

Books were made more widely available during this time, and more people were becoming fluent.  As a result, oral reading fell out of public favor.  Edmund Huey (1908, 1968) noted that oral reading was only occurring in schools, outside of which the predominate method of reading had shifted to silent reading (Rasinski, 2006).  Thus, the focus on reading for comprehension versus reading eloquently for the entertainment of others took root, and reading for understanding became the primary goal of reading instruction.  Silent reading became the most used method of reading instruction because it was more efficient than reading orally, and it allowed readers to read more of the ever-expanding body of print made available.  In fact, the Indianapolis Public Schools 1902 course of study stated, “Reading…fundamentally is not oral expression….Pupils should be taught how to read silently with the greatest economy of time and with the least conscious effort” (as quoted in Rasinski, p. 9).

By the 1920s, the view that silent reading instruction was best was broadly accepted and became such a focus in reading instruction that a program using only silent reading instruction was adopted in some Chicago schools in the 1930s and 1940s (Smith, 2002; Rasisnki, 2006).  This method, known as the McDade no-oral method took the notion of “silent” reading to an extreme, even going so far as to discourage inner speech while reading (McDade, 1937, 1944; Rasinski, 2006; Rohrer, 1943) .  Although this method was sharply criticized (Rasinski, 2006; Rohrer, 1943) and eventually discarded, it shows how far the pendulum swung away from oral reading.

Also around the beginning of the 20^th century, the development of standardized testing converged with other societal elements (more books and widespread literacy) and further aided the shift from oral reading to silent reading (Rasinski, 2006).  These tests were group-administered and used the silent reading of passages to assess individual (and school’s) progress in reading.  Since the inception of standardized testing, there has been a continuing decline of reading tests with either silent or oral fluency components (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001; Rasinski, 2006).  Rasinski and Zutell (Rasinski, 1989; Rasinski & Zutell, 1996; Rasinski, 2006; Zutell & Rasinski, 1991) noted that, by the end of the 20^th century, teacher training textbooks used to prepare them as reading instructors consisted of very little (and sometimes no) focus on fluency.

Oral reading did not fade away, however, even though it lost its place as the main focus of reading instruction.  Round robin reading, a highly criticized method involving children taking turns reading orally, generally whole-class, originally involved the teacher making notes of errors much like running records, but evolved (devolved?) into the teacher interrupting to make corrections, took root during this time (Beach, 1993; Rasinski, 2006 ).  Oral reading became a way to check word recognition, and was done with round-robin reading starting in the 1950s, as a component of basal reading programs (Hoffman, 1987; Hoffman & Segel, 1983; Rasinski, 2006).  However, “round-robin reading has never been widely advocated nor endorsed by scholars of reading” (Rasinski, 2006, p. 11).

Theories of Reading Fluency

Automaticity Theory

Laberge and Samuels (1974) automaticity theory “was perhaps the first modern theoretical conception of reading fluency” (Rasinski, 2006, p. 12).  It is the most widely cited of all the reading theories in reading methods textbooks” (Samuels, 1994).  Laberge and Samuels proposed that fluent readers can automatically recognize words, freeing attentional resources to focus on comprehension (Laberge & Samuels, 1974; Pikulski, 2006; Samuels, 1994; Taguchi, Gorsuch, & Sasamoto, 2006).  Attention is the central construct of this theory because learning to read takes considerable attention.  Getting meaning from printed words is a two-step process, involving first decoding and then comprehending the word.  In order to comprehend, non-fluent readers switch attention when they “encounter a task that requires more attention than is available” (Samuels, 1994, p. 1132).  Samuels compares this attention-switching process that occurs in reading to what happens at parties when one is listening to several conversations at once by switching attention back and forth.  Samuels explains, “Although the beginning reader is able to comprehend by switching attention back and forth in this way, the process is slow, laborious, and frustrating” (p. 1131).

So what is attention?  Samuels (1994) defines attention as “the effort or energy used to process information” (p. 1128).  He further divides attention into two components:  internal and external attention.  Samuels feels that internal attention is more crucial than external attention, and it is internal attention that is at the core of Automaticity Theory, although external attention is the more visible of the two and is judged by the orientation of the sensory organs (ears, eyes).  In this model, there are three characteristics of internal attention:  alertness, or the “active attempt to come in contact with sources of information” (p. 1129), selectivity, or choosing which inputs to focus on, and limited capacity, the idea that there is a limited amount of attention available for information processing.

If the beginning reader extracts textual meaning by attention-switching, how then does the fluent reader read?  Samuels (1994) explains this in terms of automaticity:  because the decoding is done automatically, attention is available to focus on comprehension.  He further breaks down how the Laberge-Samuels (1974) information-processing model explains the reading process.  This model is composed of four types of memory:  visual memory, phonological memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory. 

Samuels (1994) explains that a good theory has practical applications and uses automaticity theory to explain common reading problems, such as students with accurate word recognition skills who lack comprehension.  This problem, also known as “barking at print” can be explained by automaticity theory as a result of the decoding requiring so much attention that little is left for comprehension.

This model was favorably received and has continued to play a prominent role in the understanding of fluency:  “A major advancement in the understanding of fluency took place with the seminal 1974 article by LaBerge and Samuels” (Pikulski, 2006, p. 71).  In his revisitation of automatic information processing, Samuels (1994) gives a nod to Perfetti’s verbal efficiency theory, “Researchers have also realized that the concept of automaticity can be extended to any skill in reading” (p. 1127).

Verbal Efficiency Theory

Perfetti (1985) outlines verbal efficiency theory as a way to explain individual reading differences, assuming that reading is multi-faceted, in terms of cost (energy/attention) and product (comprehension).  If memory and attention are reduced, processing will be inefficient.  In order for a process to be efficient, comprehension quality is considered in relation to the level of expenditure within each processing resource.  Schema activation and lexical access should be ideally low in energy expenditure while propositional encoding (a part of meaning-making) should take the bulk of the effort.  In other words, similar to Automaticity Theory, Verbal Efficiency Theory proposes that the processes of decoding and accessing word meanings need to be as automatic as possible so that resources are available for comprehension.  When these processes are out of balance, comprehension is compromised.

 Perfetti (1985) posits that the limits on efficiency are different for different processes:  proposition encoding, even when maximally efficient, will be more resource-costly than a maximally efficient lexical access process.  Individual differences in reading are explained as a result of the inefficient processes of text work.  These processes (lexical access, propositional assembly, propositional assembly, and text modeling) are cascading; that is, they do not take place one after another but overlap.  We don't go through, decode and then "translate" into meaning, but ELLs do this at times, perhaps explaining their underlying fluency issues.  Because the processes of reading overlap, before, during, and after reading processes are thought of as overlapping, as well.

Perfetti’s (1985) theorizes that reading ability consists of being able to allocate resources in accordance with the text work demanded by an ideal text.   Efficiencies vary across texts, processes, and individuals.  A text with low readability will require more effort.  A text that is difficult for a reader with low memory capacity is easier for a reader with a higher memory capacity, lending credence to a developmental view of fluency. 

In a nutshell, “verbal efficiency” refers to how efficiently the reading subcomponents are executed, judged by speed and accuracy.  The theory posits that the more efficient lower level subcomponent processes, the more attentional resources available for comprehension, a process that expends high amounts of resources (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007; Taguchi & Gorsuch, 2002; Taguchi, Gorsuch, & Sasamoto, 2006; Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, & Gorsuch, 2004).  Like the Laberge-Samuels model, this theory focuses on automaticity in decoding, but it extends automaticity to higher-level reading processes beyond lexical access to integrating propositions, activating relevant schema, and using basic cognitive strategies, contending that these processes can also become automatic after much practice (Walczyk, 2000). 

Why Fluency, Why Now?

            As these theories show, there has been significant advancement in our understanding of reading over the past thirty years (Rasinski, 2006).  In fact, “One of the more important milestones in contemporary conceptions of reading fluency came with the publication of LaBerge and Samuels’s (1974) theory of automatic information processing in reading” (Rasinski, 2006, p. 11). 

              Allington (2006), Rasinski (2006), Samuels and  Farstrup (2006a), and  Pikulski (2006) note that fluency didn’t become a “focal point” until it was identified as an “evidence-based pillar” of scientific research by the National Reading Panel report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Health [NICHD], 2000).  This report identified fluency as one of the five critical elements necessary for acquiring and advancing one’s reading skills and this document is “seen as the blueprint for the No Child Left behind (NCLB, 2002) and Reading first legislation and funding” (Pikulski, 70).  This report, also known as the Nation’s Report card, stated:

  It appears that oral reading practice and feedback or guidance is most likely to influence measures that assess word knowledge, reading speed, and oral accuracy.  Nevertheless, the impact of these procedures on comprehension (and on total reading scores) is not inconsiderable, and in several comparisons, it was actually quite high. (NICHD, 2000, p. 3-18, as quoted in Rasinski, p. 4)

These [instructional] procedures help improve students’ reading ability, at least through grade 5, and they help improve the reading of students with learning problems much later than this. (NICHD, 2000, pp. 3-20; as quoted in Rasinski, p. 4)

              Prior to the publication of this report, even as recently as 1996, not much attention was given to fluency, and a large problem with fluency is the variance in its definition (as discussed in the next section).  Because this concept is such a difficult one to pin down, it is also difficult to assess and address in instruction and research (Rasinski, 2006).  The publication of the NRP report (NICHD, 2000), along with NCLB (2002) stipulating all students reach proficiency in reading by 2014 and stronger evidence-supported knowledge on how to develop reading fluency combined with more access to instructional tools such as IRIs (Informal Reading Inventories), computer tests to match readers to texts, and tools to establish the reading levels of texts to rekindle interest in fluency (Rasinski, 2006). 

Fluency:  What Is It?

Definitions

Reading scholars have long lamented that fluency is a difficult construct to define, one that has had a variety of meanings since at least the 1800s.  S. Jay Samuels (2006) noted that “how we define a construct such as fluency determines and influences to a large degree how we will measure it” (p. 39).  Allington (2009) explains that there are three common definitions of fluency; the oldest entails accurate, fast, expressive oral reading (Huey, 1908/1968).  Another commonly accepted definition of the construct is put forth by LaBerge and Samuels (1974, 2006), the fathers of Automaticity Theory, as being able to decode accurately and comprehend simultaneously.   A more recent and contested definition propagated by a widely used assessment tool, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (DIEBELS), contends that fluency is simply fast and oral accurate reading (Good & Kaminski, 2002).  Allington (2009) uses a combination of the first two definitions to discuss fluency, arguing  that because “…some children can read accurately and fast while comprehending little, educators must also pay attention to the second definition and incorporate measures of comprehension into their assessments of fluency development and their instruction” (p. 5). Other definitions leave out some of the elements in the above definitions.  Some researchers defined fluency as the accurate reading of connected text at a conversational rate with appropriate prosody (Torgeson & Hudson, 2006) making no mention of comprehension.  Cognitive psychologists have simplified the definition of fluency to its basic elements:  being able to do two things simultaneously after much practice (Samuels, 2006).  Samuels holds that it is the ability to decode and comprehend at the same time that is the integral component of fluency, explaining that “other behaviors such as oral reading with speed, accuracy, and expression are simply indicators of fluency.  These indicators are like temperature readings on a thermometer.  A high temperature is an indicator of a possible disease, but it is not the disease itself” (p. 39).  In other words, it is possible to read fast, accurately, and with proper expression but without comprehension, and without comprehension, Samuels believes that fluency hasn’t been achieved.  A helpful way of viewing fluency is to think of its components as reciprocal, and this comprehensive definition, a modification of Pikulski and Chard (2005), combines elements of the Report of the National Reading Panel’s definition as well as elements from The Literacy Dictionary:

Reading fluency is a developmental process that refers to efficient, effective decoding skills that permit a reader to comprehend text.  There is a reciprocal relationship between decoding and comprehension.  Fluency is manifested in accurate, rapid, expressive oral reading and is applied during, and makes possible, silent-reading comprehension (Pikulski, 2006, p. 73).

Torgesen and Hudson (2006) agree that prosody (rhythmic and tonal aspects of speech involving intonation, syllable prominence) can be a sign that the reader understands the passage as he/she identifies and pronounces the words, and that this prosody can aid comprehension (p. 134).

The general consensus is that fluency is not an all or nothing proposition, rather, it is situational (Samuels, 2006) and exists on a continuum (Pikulski, 2006; Pressley, Gaskins, & Fingeret, 2006; Topping, 2006; Torgeson & Hudson, 2006).  Samuels (2006) explains that all proficient readers can be fluent when reading certain levels of texts, especially those covering familiar topics; thus, fluency is context-dependent rather than static.  Samuels notes that we are not happy all the time, “nor are we fluent all the time” (p. 39), pointing to the readability level of text as a major factor affecting fluency.  One can read a third grade text fluently, for example, but could flounder in a college text on linguistics (Samuels, 2006; Topping, 2006).  This developmental approach to fluency is supportive of Perfetti’s (1985) Verbal Efficiency Theory, in which he theorizes that efficiencies can vary based on the process in question across both individuals and texts.  These three variables interact to formulate various degrees of fluency at any given time.

Developmental Approach to Fluency

  A helpful way of viewing fluency is from a developmental viewpoint (Pikulski, 2006).  Because fluency doesn’t occur altogether in one instant, “there are probably stages of fluency, with word-level fluency as a precursor to fluent, constructively responsive reading, which varies in adequacy depending on the difficulty of the text for the reader” (Pressley, Gaskins, & Fingeret, 2006, p. 47).  In other words, fluency begins with accurate lexical access, or word recognition, which leads to a reader reading and constructing meaning.  Also, a text that may be inaccessible to a third-grader could become accessible as the reader matures as readers as a result of reading practice and becomes more fluent at reading increasingly difficult texts (Samuels & Farstrup, 2006b, p. v).  Samuels (1997, 1979) identifies three stages of fluency development:  the nonaccurate stage, the accuracy stage, and the automatic stage.

  Ehri’s (1995, 1998) stage theory of reading is widely accepted and “recognizes and acknowledges the important role of language and construction of meaning, and seems directly related to fluency and its development” (Pikulski, 2006, pp. 73-4).  Pikulski holds forth Ehri’s stages of development as a useful lens for viewing the construct of fluency.  Ehri presents four stages of reading development:  pre-alphabetic, partial-alphabetic, fully-alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic. 

     Readers in the pre-alphabetic stage don’t understand that letters are related to sounds; they don’t grasp the alphabetic principal.  They use visual cues in print to try to read words.  The next stage, the partial-alphabetic stage, is reached when readers learn that letters and sounds are related.  They start to use that insight to decode text.  Readers in this stage focus on the most memorable, salient features of a word, the initial, and later, final, letters as clues to aid in the pronunciation of a printed word.  Pikulski explains that children at this stage will still misidentify words, though they are on the road to fluency as a result of their developing understanding of how letters in words work.  Chall (1983), in her developmental model of reading refers to this phase as “glued to print,” the stage in which children typically fingerpoint as they read word by word (Allington, 2009).

Their increasing familiarity with letters and sounds leads readers into the fully alphabetic stage.  In this stage, even when they haven’t seen a word before, they can think about the letters and their sounds and through sounding them out, can figure out the correct pronunciation of a word.  After encountering a printed word enough times (as few as four), “they come to accurately, instantly identify the word…without attending to the individual letters, sounds, or letter-sound associations” leading to the development of sight word vocabulary (words known as “at-a-glance” (Allington, 2009) which is “the needed fluency that will allow readers to focus their attention on comprehension rather than decoding” (Pikulski, 2006, p.75).

Once whole words can be recognized at a glance, readers have entered the final stage, the consolidated alphabetic stage, which “represents the ability to recognize words rapidly and accurately, characteristics most closely associated with fluency” (Pikulski, 2006, p. 75).  Also in this stage, more than sight words are stored.  Rimes, onsets, chunks of words, and letter patterns across words are also stored in memory, which allows readers to decode faster than when blending individual phonemes, but this type of decoding is not as fast as the instantaneous recognition of sight words. 

Readers who have reached the consolidated alphabetic stage are much closer to achieving optimal fluency; however, they still need to develop vocabulary because unique and infrequent words, especially content words, can pose problems for these readers, hindering fluency (and thus comprehension) when they have to go back to sounding out a word (and then searching for the meaning in context rather than in semantic memory), especially since knowing a word can help with its recognition (Pikulski, 2006).   Ehri’s stage theory of reading development is a useful way of looking at fluency, the development of which will be explored in the next section. 

Fluency Development

Graphophonic Skills

Ehri (1995) points to letter familiarity, phonemic awareness, and phonics as prerequisites to fluency, and these skills are necessary for a reader to progress to the partial and pre-alphabetic stage.  As Pikulski (2006) notes, “The importance of these three prerequisite skill areas to fluency is fully documented in numerous research reports (e.g., Adams, 1990; NICHD, 2000)” (p. 77).

However, even when readers have become fully alphabetic, phonically irregular, high-frequency words still pose a specific difficulty for readers on their way to developing fluency (Pikulski, 2006; Allington, 2009; Weber, 2006).  Often, these irregular words, whose pronunciation cannot be accessed by simply blending together the elements, tend to be function words.   Weber (2006) explains that function words, which make up about ½ of the words that children read and are the 50 most frequent words children encounter in print.  In addition to being irregular, these words are also hard to define and have graphic similarities, similarities that cause them to be interchanged frequently in reading (Allington, 2006; Weber, 2006).  Ehri (1995) suggests stressing the elements of these words that are phonetically regular as one strategy to help students decode these quicker and more accurately, enabling fluency (Pikulski, 2006).  Another hindrance to fluency caused by function words is the fact that these words tend to be unstressed in speech and in oral reading, “which is part of what gives English its unique rhythmic quality” (Allington, 2009, p. 18).  And in both speech and oral reading, the pronunciation of the vowels in function words shift to schwa (Allington, 2009, p. 18).  To further complicate matters, the pronunciation of function words can shift depending on their role in the sentence, even sounding like a syllable in an adjoining word (“you’kn, wan’na, did’ja, hav’ta”) (p. 19).  Thus, a major difference between fluent and dysfluent readers is how they read function words orally; dysfluent readers pronounce these with the same stress and pause as content words and are known as word-by word readers because they lack prosody.

            As noted, the shift from fully-alphabetic to consolidated-alphabetic involves developing a store of sight words.  Adams (1990) calls the system that allows words to be recognized at a glance as the “orthographic processor.”  She theorizes that after 10-25 successful pronunciations of the target word, the word is recognized as a unit and doesn’t need to be sounded out.  “At a glance, words are then recognized very quickly and require the use of little cognitive attention” (Allington, 2009, p. 29).  Allington proclaims, “How many words can be recognized at a glance is critical to fluent reading” (p. 29).  Thus, accuracy, as developed in the partial alphabetic stage, is important, because every time a word is misread, the developing at-a-glance recognition of that word is hindered, ultimately stagnating fluency development.

Oral Language Skills Needed for Fluency

            As fluency develops in students naturally, they draw on certain oral language skills they have acquired, typically in the home environment before ever beginning formal schooling. These skills are necessary in addition to the graphophonic skills of letter familiarity, phonemic awareness (being consciously aware of sounds that comprise speech), and phonics (knowing how graphemes, printed letters, or strings of letters represent language sounds (phonemes) in words that allow beginning readers to “capitalize on the oral-language skills they have been developing to engage in beginning reading” (Pikulski, 2006, p. 77).  Ehri’s (1995) theory of reading development in stages is based on the idea that beginning readers have a strong foundation of language skills such as grammatical and syntax knowledge and vocabulary even before they enter the pre-alphabetic stage (Pikulski, 2006).  To activate the meaning of a word that has been decoded, readers must be familiar with the meaning and syntactic aspects of the word in oral language; therefore, fluency requires more than decoding skills but also relies on vocabulary (Pikulski, 2006). 

In addition to the positive effects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax knowledge taken from oral language experiences on reading, oral language plays another important role for the developing reader.  A familiarity with oral language helps readers develop the prosodic nature of fluent reading.  Weber (2006) demonstrated that as young children build their reading proficiency, they must make connections between the printed word on the page and the forms in speech that they have hardly noticed that carry weak stress, variable pronunciation, and tenuous but necessary meanings in sentences.  Beginning readers distort the prosody of English by reading, in the extreme, word by word.  They may often lose track of the identity of a particular function word in the context of complex sentences.  But as they consolidate their knowledge, they build up their fluency and approach the rhythm of strong and weak syllables of familiar speech.  As discussed earlier, the treatment of function words is also aided by oral language knowledge, specifically knowing how they are pronounced and stressed in specific instances (Allington, 2009).  Punctuation provides the only clues in written English for phrasing, so “readers must rely on what they know about phrasing while speaking as they begin to read in phrases” (p. 21).  English isn’t read in random phrases of two to three words, rather, it is read in meaning phrases. 

Fostering (and Hindering) Fluency Development

            As Chomsky (1978) noted in an early article on fluency development, and as Allington (2009) reiterates, fluency development begins naturally in the home.  Children who are read to frequently by parents or other caretakers will eventually “read” a much-loved and often-repeated book from memory and will do so with expression (although not very accurately).  The more models of fluent reading a child has, especially in pre-school years, the better for his/her reading development.  Allington notes, “There is a specific voice register that people use when reading aloud” (p. 16); therefore, one can discriminate between oral reading and speaking.  A child learns to mimic this behavior.  No one is sure how many fluent models of how many stories is needed to foster fluency, but it is clear that “children who arrive at school with many, many experiences of being read to almost invariably become fluent readers unless something in the classroom interferes” (p. 15).

            What sorts of things in the classroom can impede the acquisition of fluency?  Being provided with texts that are too difficult is one of the major roadblocks to fluency development (Allington, 2009, p. 26).  Unfortunately, struggling readers are too often provided with grade level reading materials when they lag behind their peers.  Thus, they continue to read in the laborious word-by-word manner, even once accuracy is attained, because that’s how they were trained to read.  Allington (2009) explains that being able to read a text with 98% or 99 % accuracy will ensure that the book is not too difficult.  Accuracy is an integral part of fluency because, as noted earlier, it takes many successive correct readings of a word for that word to become a sight word, and it is this ability to recognize words on first sight that constitutes automaticity. 

            When a reader is reading a book that is too difficult, research has shown that teachers interrupt these struggling readers more often, more quickly, than their proficient peers to correct or have them sound out a mispronounced word (Allington, 1980; Chinn et al., 1993; Hoffman et al, 1984) and even allow other readers to interrupt these nonproficient readers while discouraging such behaviors when better readers read (Eder & Felmee, 1984).  Allington (2009) argues that this habit of “interruptive reading” creates a “learned helplessness” (Dweck, 1986) and dysfluent, passive readers (Johnston & Winograd, 1985).  Essentially, a struggling reader who is continually reading frustration level texts will more often be asked to read aloud.  During this reading aloud session, this reader is more likely to be interrupted and corrected as soon as an error is made, not giving the reader a chance to get to the end of a line, realize the sentence as read made no sense, and use metacognitive strategies to self-correct.  In turn, the reader is learning to be hesitant, pausing frequently to wait for teacher support, and develops this word by word reading style (Allington, 2009).

            Another side effect of reading too many too difficult texts is that the struggling reader is being afforded less opportunity to read widely, and volume of reading in high success texts is linked to reading proficiency because it allows readers to use and consolidate learned skills, eventually to the point of automaticity (Share & Stanovich, 1995; Stanovich & West, 1989; Allington, 2009).  These below-grade level readers are most often reading grade-level texts most (or all) of the day, and they learn to see reading as a difficult task, one that creates high anxiety and is not enjoyable.  Because reading is not pleasurable, these students begin to avoid reading, and the less they read, the more their skills stagnate, a catch-22 process Nuttall (1996) refers to as a “vicious circle” (Allington, 2009; Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007).  The less they read, the more they fall behind, presenting these struggling readers with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to fluency (Torgesen & Hudson, 2006).

This lack of practice severely limits the number of words students can recognize automatically, and this limitation of sight vocabulary is the primary characteristic of most struggling readers beyond the first stages of learning to read (Rashotte, McPhee, & Torgesen, 2001; Torgesen, Alexander, et al., 2001; Wise, Ring, & Olson, 1999).  By the third grade, the grade-level readers have read millions more words than have the struggling readers, meaning that the proficient readers have more than likely added most of the 3,000 most frequent words to their sight vocabularies due to enough successful encounters with these words (Allington, 2009).  Gutherie (2004) estimates that students reading below the 25^th percentile read approximately 30 minutes a day.  Those at the 50^th percentile read around 120 minutes daily, and at the 75^th percentile, they read around 210 minutes per day.  The lack of vocabulary development and practice is what makes older dysfluent readers so difficult to remediate (Torgesen & Hudson, 2006).

On the other hand, being provided the opportunity to read high-success texts (with an accuracy level of 98% or better), has important socioemotional effects, such as greater self confidence and satisfaction which in turn leads to intrinsic reinforcement and motivation to read (Topping, 2006; Allington, 2009).

Allington (2009) explains that to be a fluent reader, students need decoding skills, a large meaning vocabulary and sight vocabulary, self-monitoring and comprehension skills, and motivation to read often and with purpose. Torgesen and Hudson (2006) add that the use of context to speed up word identification, the speed with which word meanings are identified, and the speed in which overall meaning is constructed from the text are also factors strongly affecting fluency.  Topping (2006) discusses these needed skills as “predisposing factors”, adding that a student’s ability to manage text difficulty, the time exposed and time on task, memory, motivation, and confidence are other factors that facilitate fluency development.  Willcutt (2004) reports Lipson and Bouffard Lang’s (1991) characteristics of dysfluent readers:  1. They have average or above average decoding skills but word recognition is not automatic (Dowhower, 1987; Samuels, 1979), 2.They make substitution errors, long pauses, frequent repetitions, and read with inappropriate phrasing (Barr, Sadow, & Blachowicz, 1990), 3. They tend to be beginning readers (Reitsma, 1988), 4. They read slowly (Herman, 1985), 5. They read choppily (Rhodes & Dudley-Marling, 1988), and 6. They read word by word and don’t preserve the syntax (Aulls, 1978).   Dysfluency is fostered through the reading of too-difficult texts that can’t be read with accuracy, much less automaticity, interruptive reading, and literacy experiences that offer too few high-success reading opportunities, and unfortunately, according to Allington (2009), these elements are present in the lessons struggling readers receive.

ELLs’ Reading Fluency

The Importance of L1 Literacy

Although much is known about the acquisition of reading for native speakers of English, the reading acquisition/processes of ELLs remains murky. One of many controversies regarding ELLs and language acquisition is the extent that ELLs can be facile readers in English if they aren’t literate in their first (Geva, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Schuster, 2000).  Geva et al. theorize that ELLs develop phonological awareness (PA) in English as a result of positive transfer from their L1 after they learn to speak and then read the language.  In other words, students who have some degree of literacy in their native language will already possess PA; these skills developed in their L1 will help them acquire English reading proficiency.  PA is the sole factor that enables decoding in the early stages of reading (Stanovich, 1982, 1986, 1988). If ELLs have a strong literacy background in their L1, they are probable to also develop strong English skills; unfortunately, many ELLs lack this native literacy (Willcutt, 2004). ELLs “differ widely in the literacy abilities they bring to school. Research suggests that children only need to learn to read and write once (Snow, 1990)” (Au, 2006). There can be positive transfer between L1 and L2 with elements such as the alphabet, sounds, cognates, syntax, and reading strategies; Au agrees with Snow’s (1990) recommendation that the best way for an ELL to achieve literacy is to start with learning to read and write in their native language.  However, bilingual instruction is offered on a limited basis in the US (Au).

Oral Language Proficiency:  An Indicator of Reading Readiness?

Another debate is currently raging over the relationship between oral language proficiency and reading acquisition/fluency for the ELL population.  In recent years, “simplistic notions about ELLs’ literacy development have been challenged, “including the notion that second language (L2) oral proficiency can be used as a chief index of L2 reading” (Geva, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Schuster, 2000, p. 124).   Research does show that “young children can learn to decode and spell words without apparent difficulty, even when their oral L2 proficiency is still developing” (Geva, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Schuster, p. 125).  A major argument regarding second language acquisition and reading centers around whether or not a student should be relatively proficient before reading is taught.

Chall (1996) found that children who learn to read and speak English concurrently can’t rely on their familiarity with the phonology, vocabulary, and grammar structures as much as native speakers do, which is why educators argue that ELLs should first develop oral language proficiency before learning to read.  These oral language skills are important to the development of reading fluency (Allington, 2009; Pikulski, 2006; Weber, 2006). 

Palumbo & Willcutt (2006) argue that oral language skills are very important to the reading process, specifically for ELLs:  “Oral language skills influence the ability to map spoken language onto print” (p. 163).  Thus, ELLs who have minimal exposure to English will have a more difficult time acquiring reading proficiency; “Compared to L1 readers who have learned the mother tongue orally before learning to read, L2/F1 [ELL] readers are handicapped in terms of exposure to the language they are learning” (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007, p. 254).   Students with language backgrounds different from English will have different ideas of syntax, morphology, tones and phonology, lexicon, polysemy, and orthography, and “when the child’s language does not match the language of the school, children will use the best strategy they have, which is to match their native spoken language to English” (Palumbo & Willcutt, p. 164).  However, these languages have varying degrees of overlap with English, which could led to positive or negative transfer.

The counterargument is that the development of oral language skills does not mean a child will be able to master reading because the skills may not be the same (Limbos & Geva, 2001).  More recently, Geva, along with colleagues, has acquiesced that “for language-minority learners, oral language proficiency plays an important role in the acquisition of skilled reading” (Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel, & Shanahan; 2008, p. 29).  Limbos and Geva (2001) point out that “oral language skills such as narrative and communicative adequacy have not been found to correlate significantly with prereading variables such as phonemic awareness, print production, and decoding” (p. 138).  Some studies have shown that with ELLs, vocabulary and grammar don’t appear to be related to word-identification (Limbos & Geva), although these findings aren’t supported by prominent research done with native speakers (Allington, 2009; Pikulski, 2006; Torgesen and Hudson, 2006; Weber, 2006).  As with native speakers, syntax has been shown to aid in the reading process, although syntactical knowledge of the language is not as important as PA (Limbos & Geva).  Gorsuch and Taguchi (2007) note that “the prevailing perception among L2/FL [foreign language] educators is that fluency will develop as learners’ overall proficiency grows” (p. 255) but Koda (2005) contends that there is little empirical data to support this supposition.  Rather, the data shows that the two proficiencies (oral language and reading fluency) “do not necessarily develop hand in hand (Favreau & Segalowitz, 1983; Segalowitz, 1986; Segalowitz, et al., 1991)” (Gorsuch & Taguchi, p. 255).

 It is possible to be orally proficient but not be a fluent reader, findings supported by Cummins’s (1979) widely accepted distinction of the types of proficiency ELLs acquire and when.  BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) is the first fluency to occur, and it is conversational fluency, a fluency developed to a functional level within two years of the first exposure/immersion in the second language. CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) refers to the academic components of a language, including reading, and developing significant fluency academically takes between five and seven years for developmentally “normal” students (Klessmer, 1994; Cummins, 1981a).  This distinction can account for some of the disproportianality of ELLs in special education because they lack academic proficiency, although they can speak English in the hallways, making them appear delayed even though this lag between the two proficiencies is developmentally appropriate for second language learners (Cummins, 1984; Limbos & Geva, 2001).  On the other hand, some students who need services are not referred in an effort to wait the five to seven years for CALP, although research is providing educators with some options for identifying struggling ELL readers as soon as possible because early intervention is key (Limbos & Geva, 2001).

Contributions of Oral Language Skills to ELLs’ Fluency

How does ELLs’ oral proficiency relate to reading fluency?  The relationship appears to be much the same as that for native speakers of the language.  ELLs’ receptive language skills, expressive skills, phonological knowledge, vocabulary, morphological knowledge, and grammar all impact reading fluency (Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel, & Shanahan; 2008).   Grabe and Stoller (2002) suggest that being able to identify grammatical structures while reading, and performing related tasks such as identifying pronouns and antecedents significantly aid comprehension, and these skills are gained in part from oral language knowledge.  In addition, ELLs, in contrast to native speakers, are hindered because they do not have implicit grammar knowledge and a vast vocabulary prior to learning to read, and these are “necessary to develop automatic word recognition and some basic post-lexical access comprehension skills” (Taguchi, Gorsuch, & Sasamoto, 2006; np).  As a result of diminished vocabulary knowledge, these students tend to be dysfluent, word-by-word readers (Palumbo & Willcutt, 2006).  Furthermore, comprehension is hindered because in order to understand what one is reading, the decoded word must activate a proper meaning; this semantic activation is less likely to occur with beginning ELLs (Palumbo & Willcutt).  Before achieving any sense of automatic decoding, “they will need to increase their English vocabulary and their familiarity with English story grammars, text structure, and perhaps new concepts” (p. 161).  Native English speakers have not only acquired basic grammatical knowledge, but they have also developed an oral vocabulary of between 5000 and 7000 words before learning to read (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007).   

Cultural Factors Affecting ELLs’ Fluency

There are other factors, aside from oral language skills, that affect ELLs’ reading fluency.  These factors are cultural.  For one, many ELLs don’t share the same cultural background with native speakers of English, they lack background knowledge about things that are common to our history or popular culture, including allusions and expressions (idioms) referencing or deriving from these (Palumbo & Willcutt, 2006).  “Simply decoding the language can be a formidable task, [especially if there is a mismatch between the sounds in the students L1 and English] so deriving meanings from figures of speech without the aid of cultural background can make the task of comprehension more difficult” (Palumbo & Willcutt, p. 163).  This lack of background knowledge is referred to as a lack of cultural capital or linguistic capital and also involves being able to produce the appropriate phrases at the correct time (Willcutt, 2004).  Many ELLs come to school without even a concept of print.  For example, the Hmong language so recently acquired a written form that these students may have never been exposed to the written word and would have no cognizance of what a book is or what it’s for, that English is read left to right, that words are separated on a page by white spaces, that one spoken word per written word represents meaning, or that letters correspond to sounds (Palumbo & Willcutt).  In Arabic and Hebrew, reading occurs left to right, and this change could confound ELLs; therefore, teaching basic text navigation skills to new ELLs would foster fluency (Palumbo & Willcutt). Some students will have to learn how to be an active participant in reading activities such as literature circles and other book discussions because some cultures stress correctness, teaching students not to participate if they are not sure they have the correct answer (Au). Even if a student’s L1 has a lot of commonalities with English, the development of automatic word knowledge can be a long way off for them (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2007).

The Role of Educational Insult

Compounding the difficulty of acquiring a second language and becoming a proficient reader in that language is the idea of educational insult.  Unfortunately, ELLs, “like struggling readers, are often subject to instruction oriented toward lower level skills rather than higher level thinking” (Au, p. 401).  Day and Bamford (1998) explain that ELLs can only improve their reading skills through practice.  However, teachers tend to place hypercritical focus on the perfection of oral language, “such as correct pronunciation of English, rather than the content of the areas students are trying to communicate” and this focus on surface features “may lead teachers to underestimate students’ ability to read and comprehend English texts” (Au, p. 403). ELLs tend to be instructed using round robin reading with an emphasis on proper pronunciation, grammar exercises, and limited opportunities to actually learn to read (Au).  Furthermore, ELLs are taught survival skills such as how to “read traffic signs, fill out forms and applications, make a doctor’s appointment, and pass citizenship tests” (Palumbo & Willcutt, (p. 170) because reading fluency is seen as a lofty ideal.  Schools also tend to isolate ELLs in these basic skills courses (Au).  This tendency to not focus on reading when teaching ELLs highlights the debate in the field:  Does a student need oral proficiency before at least setting to work on reading fluency?  It is clear that there is a relationship between the two, with oral language skills aiding the reading process (Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel, & Shanahan; 2008).  Regardless of oral proficiency or literacy in their native languages, the fact remains that ELLs enter US schools and they have to “learn with enormous efficiency if they are to catch up with their monolingual English classmates” (Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel, & Shanahan, 2008, p. 27).

The Method of Repeated Readings

History

After conceptualizing the theory of automaticity, Samuels (1979) began thinking of ways to test this theory.  Samuels developed the method of repeated readings (RR), involving rereading a short, meaningful passage until set criterion is reached and recording speed and accuracy on a graph after each, and found that it led to improvement in a variety of areas in reading, such as accuracy, rate, and expression, that these improvements transferred to new passages, and that the number of practices needed to reach criterion (typically words per minute) fell over time (Rasinski, 2006).  Since the first publication of his article on RR (1979), Samuels (1997) has maintained a literature search on the topic, and has learned from the approximately 200 studies 1.) The original finding that a high degree of accuracy and speed develops as text is practiced was replicated, 2.) This fluency transfers to new text, 3.) “Repeated reading is the most universally used remedial reading technique to help poor readers achieve reading skill” (p. 381), and 4.) The method has found wide use in the teaching of foreign languages.      

However, Samuels (1979; 1997) explains that this method didn’t originate with him entirely, noting that in the 17^th century in both America and Europe, books used to teach reading had familiar materials that many could recite from memory, even though they couldn’t yet read the material.  Hornbooks are one example, and they used familiar prayers and verses (Samuels, 1979; 1997).  The catechism and the Bible are other texts often used to teach reading; these were memorized at home prior to reading instruction.  Samuels, 1979; 1997).  These texts had a commonality aside from religion:

In each of the cases mentioned, the children were introduced to reading with material which was known to them, and they read the material a number of times until they were able to read the words with some degree of fluency” (Samuels, 1997, p. 380).

Chomsky (1978) was also discovering RR as a method of remediating readers struggling with fluency issues around the same time as Samuels.  Chomsky, reflected on the process by which her children were self-motivated to read perhaps because “a child of academic parents, of course, may be highly motivated to participate in learning to read because reading is something that the people around him spend a great deal of time doing” (p. 15) and hit on a method of assisted RR, very similar to Samuels’s (1979, 1997) conception.

   In an anecdotal report, Chomsky makes insightful observations about the development of fluency and the reading process as she worked to provide an effective intervention to five dysfluent readers from working class families, who had few, if any, books in their home.  She also commented that they rarely saw other family members engaged in reading.  Chomsky first assessed their basic skills through the administration of a spelling test that showed that they all possessed accurate word knowledge. She surmised that these readers needed to work on speed.

Drawing again on her observations of her own children, Chomsky (1978) realized that to increase their speed, she needed to both engage them and provide a quantity of accessible material because these conditions hadn’t been present in the home and perhaps they were the elements that had been lacking.

Chomsky (1978) struck on the idea of using memorizing text as a way to “jumpstart” these readers’ success, providing them with some successful reading experiences so that they would be engaged and motivated to continue trying.  She rationalized her method, noting that it is common for small children to memorize books before they learn how to read them.  Such a child knows these favorite stories “by heart” and can ““read” the story aloud, turning the pages at the proper time, rendering the story accurately and with expression, and looking for all the world as if he were actually reading” (p. 17).  Thus, she argued that, although memorizing a text seemed to be a false, non-engaging artifice, it was actually more in line with what naturally occurs with good readers. 

Chomsky’s (1978) method involved having the students repeatedly listen to a tape of a storybook while reading along in the book enough times that they could fluently read the book themselves.  Once they knew the book by rote, they did other text work, such as practicing the spelling of new words in the stories.  This listening while reading method, also known as assisted repeated reading, was originally conceived by Heckelman in 1969 and several others.  Samuels (1979, 1997) is careful to explain that Heckelman’s method did not involve rereading or re-listening, simply reading while listening to a new text each time.  Huey referred to this method as the imitative method of teaching reading, referring to schooling in the Orient where “children bawl in concert over a book, imitating their fellows or their teachers until they come to know what the page says and to read it for themselves” (as quoted in Chomsky, 1978, p. 17).  Huey, well before Chomsky or Samuels, drew the same parallels between this school experience and what many young readers are innately drawn to do in their years before school, “having by a similar method pored over the books and pictures of nursery jingles and fairy tales that were told to him, until he could read them for himself” (as quoted in Chomsky, 1978, p. 17). 

Chomsky (1978) rationalized that these five struggling eight-year-olds needed to be surrounded by large amounts of texts.  Like speaking, she theorized that one can’t learn to read without full immersion in literature.  She understood that these 3^rd graders had an advantage over a toddler memorizing books before learning to read:  they’d already had extensive schooling in phonics and blending, could already sound out words, and could read others by sight.  Chomsky explained their fluency skills this way: 

What they need is to shift their focus from the individual word to connected discourse and to integrate the somewhat fragmented knowledge….they need help with…learning to attend to the semantics and syntax of a written passage (p. 18).

Chomsky (1978) used fairytales and stories from a 2^nd to 5^th grade reading level during the assisted RR sessions.  Most were 20-30 pages; some were longer.  These books were also recorded on tape with different voices used for different characters and so forth.  The students selected their books based on interest, but “they were to pick one that was too hard to read straight off but not so hard as to be entirely out of range,” though how Chomsky ensured matching students with instructional level texts is unclear (p. 19).  They listened to their books at least once daily, reading along in the book.  This process took about 15 minutes.  Then they could re-listen to parts of their choosing for careful preparation.  Another component of the intervention was recording themselves reading with or without the taped, fluent model.

Chomsky (1978) worked with each student for 30 minutes a week, and a graduate student also worked with them, listening to their performances of the texts they’d previously prepared through listening, re-listening, reading, and rereading.  They also did analytic work on those passages.  In the beginning, the going was slow as students acclimated to the use of the tape recorders.  After about 20 listenings of the first text, 4/5 had achieved oral fluency.  This took about a month.  The other student completed the first book with fluency in 2 weeks, and he was proud of being able to fluently read a book for the first time. His teacher was amazed at his progress, for “in his whole life [he] had never read so much as an entire page” (p. 21).  After experiencing failure for 2 ½ years, this accomplishment “transformed him” (p. 21).  Chomsky reflected on this success, noting that “he would have been unable to make headway had he not been exposed to the text through repeated listening—perhaps ten or twelve times” (p. 21).  His performance was a combination of reading and memorization.  Another student, also male, explained why this method was successful for him, “It helps when I can hear it while I look at it.  It makes the hard words as easy as the easy words’ (p. 21).  Students took their books and tape recorders home for additional practice.  This process continued for three months, at the end of which all 5 participants had achieved fluency with six books, except for one who worked through a longer book for the duration.

Chomsky (1978) attributed the success of this method to the fact that the difficulty and frustration of struggling had been removed from the reading process, and their success had eliminated the public humiliation of reading aloud.    Parents reported that these former non-readers had all begun reading books at home for pleasure, volunteering to read aloud to visitors.  They started reading during meals and even read cereal boxes.  At school, teachers reported this shift as well, noting with amazement that they chose to read during free time and started writing their own stories.  She speculated that the special attention, new books, and tape recorders provided extra motivation for these readers who “for once…had something good that the others wanted” (p. 25).  She also explained that these readers finally had something they could do, a welcome switch, and used Kagan’s (1974) explanation of motivation to explain the students’ change in attitude:

…individuals will cease investing effort in a problem if they doubt their ability to solve it—if they have no expectation of success.  Much of the time the only way a child can tell if he is progressing adequately towards a goal is by checking to see how other children his age are doing.  If he is advancing at the same rate as they, he feels confident and continues to work.  If he perceives that he is far behind, he is apt to conclude that he is incompetent and cease investing effort (as quoted in Chomsky, 1978, p. 25). 

Chomsky’s experience and detailed report clearly delineated the benefits such a method could reap, but the true test of the methods would be empirical studies.

Studies Involving Repeated Readings as a Fluency Intervention

RR Intervention Studies with Elementary Native Speakers

            Many studies have been done using RR as a fluency intervention for native speakers of English in grades k-4; and although this fluency intervention has been sanctioned by the National Reading Panel (NRP), there are contradictory findings regarding its effectiveness.  

Lending this procedure the most credence is its support from the NRP: “The report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) is unequivocal in its support of repeated-reading procedures” (Pikulski, 2006, p. 89); however, only 14 of 77 studies were included in this meta-analysis (Allington, 2009). Therrien’s (2004) meta-analysis of 18 RR intervention studies (as cited in Allington, 2009) showed that RR was an effective intervention; however, it was more effective when students were cued to focus on fluency and comprehension, when a target rate rather than a number of rereading was set, when they had an adult model fluency and monitor the sessions, and when texts were matched to students’ reading ability. Two other major recent research reviews, Kuhn and Stahl (2003) and the NRP (2000), “point to the largely consistent evidence that the technique of repeated readings improves the fluency of struggling readers” (Allington, p. 40). Kuhn and Stall (as cited by Topping, 2006) reported that in 7 of the 15 studies they reviewed, RR outperformed the control groups, although control conditions varied.  Kuhn and Stall (as cited by Allington) conclude that much of the RR research is flawed because most of the studies didn’t have control groups reading while treatment groups participated in RR.  In 2007, Kuhn and colleagues (as cited by Allington) did  a large-scale study comparing extensive reading with RR, concluding that wide reading was more effective because the improvements were seen sooner, and these improvements transferred to connected text reading.  Rashotte and Torgesen (1985) compared different RR techniques but found no effect for any of them (as cited in Topping).  Dowhower (1987) reported that RR affected prosodic features (as cited in Topping).  Homan, Klesius, and Hite’s 1993 study on RR showed no outcome difference between groups repeatedly reading texts and those reading widely, leading the investigators to conclude that time spent reading was the likely factor improving fluency (as cited in Topping).  Mathes and Fuchs (1993) compared two groups receiving the RR treatment: one with hard texts and one with easy texts, and found no effect difference (as cited in Topping). Young, Bowers, and MacKinnon (1996) found transfer effects from old, reread passages to new passages as a result of RR (as cited in Topping). The NRP reported the greatest gains using RR with texts that shared the most words, used the most frequent words, and used phonetically regular words (Hiebert, 2006). Topping concludes that these studies taken together show that “RR can enhance reading speed, comprehension, and expression, but this enhancement is not guaranteed, and generalization of these improvements to new texts is not automatic” (p. 115), especially when there are few words shared between texts. Because the majority of these studies were carried out with struggling readers, there isn’t much support for their use with average or above average readers (Allington), but for struggling readers with fluency problems, this approach is an important bridge to fluency (Pikulski, 2006).

RR Intervention Studies with Older Native Speakers

Fluency and Secondary Students.

            Few studies have been done with older struggling readers in reading in general, and the same is true of RR.  One reason fluency hasn’t been studied much with this demographic is that the assumption is that fluency is a concern in the primary grades.  However, Pinnell et al. (1995) looked at fourth grade reading fluency using NAEP’s testing results and determined that almost half of the sample still didn’t have a basic level of reading fluency.  These findings indicate that fluency is indeed a concern beyond fourth grade.

            Rasinski, Padak, McKeon, Wilfong, Friedauer, and Heim (2005) work in a university reading clinic and have observed that the majority of struggling readers in grades 2-8 referred to their program have fluency problems.  To discover whether or not urban middle and high school students who struggle in reading have difficulties rooted in fluency, Rasinski et al. assessed the decoding accuracy and fluency levels of a large sample of ninth graders at the end of the year to ensure their peak fluency was recorded.  They used reading rate to assess the fluency of 303 ninth graders, a population which had previously performed poorly on state high school graduation tests, in a moderately-sized Midwestern urban school district.  They used a 1 minute CBM probe in reading, also known as Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) Assessment, using a ninth grade passage, though the passage may have been at frustration level for some.  Their average word-recognition accuracy was 97.4%, which Rasinski et al, determined sufficient because 95% accuracy typically indicates that the text is at an instructional reading level for students.  Their fluency rate was 136.4 words correct per minute (on average); however, no established norms for fluency rates grade 9 or above could be found, perhaps because of the “conventional wisdom that reading fluency is not an issue at the secondary level” (p. 24).  Thus, Rasinski et al. used the spring fluency norms for eighth graders, as developed by Johns & Bergland, 2002, with the understanding that because reading rate increases as students mature across grade levels, these were conservative estimates of ninth grade fluency rates.  However, on average, these ninth graders read below the 25^th% for eighth graders, 145 WCPM. 

            Rasinski et al. (2005) determined from this study that these ninth graders, as a whole, had not achieved a normal, adequate level of fluency.  They determined that a severe fluency deficit existed for these ninth graders, who read, on average, 100 WCPM, the typical end-of-year reading rate for second and third graders.  Considering that 167 WCPM is “the average reading rate against which teachers measure reading assignments, any reading assignment given to this group of students (nearly one out of eight students) requires at least 150% more time to complete than what the teacher might otherwise expect” (p. 25). 

            Although this study was not designed to determine whether fluency (or a lack thereof) leads to improved (or deficient) comprehension, Rasinski et al. ran a correlation between reading fluency and the reading comprehension scores on the state high school graduation tests.  They found that approximately 25% of the variations on the tests could be accounted for by fluency, leading them to conclude that improving fluency could lead to comprehension improvement.  The researchers identified the need to test the relationship between fluency and comprehension by giving a fluency intervention.  Regardless, they call for fluency instruction at the secondary level, noting that “because reading fluency has generally been thought of as within the domain of elementary grades, it is unlikely that fluency is taught directly or systematically in the middle and secondary grades” (p. 26), though it needs to be taught for those who struggle, and repeated readings is one suggested way, “one of the most powerful ways to increase reading fluency” (p. 26).  For the secondary classroom, Rasinski recommends performance-based RR, such as Reader’s Theater, and suggests texts such as poetry, scripts, oratory, and song lyrics.

 A Small Study on RR in the Secondary Setting.

            Valleley and Shriver (2003), noticed a dearth of research on secondary reading specifically with regards to fluency, and a growing need for discovering what works with this group.  According to them, the Center for Education Reform (1998) reported that 25% of 12^th graders lack basic reading skills. High school kids who struggle with reading and writing are more likely to drop out (Levin, Zigmond, & Birch, 1985), make less money, and experience higher levels of unemployment (Baydar, Brooks-Gunn, & Furstenberg, 1993).   However, typical educational practice today does not address the needs of struggling readers beyond elementary school.  In fact, “it has been argued that secondary students do not gain additional “basic skills” because of a lack of direct and intensive instruction in these skills at this level (Espin & Tindal, 1998).  Secondary teachers are not typically trained to remediate struggling readers, nor do they see it as their role, and “reading instruction is often neglected at the secondary level because teachers at the secondary level do not view themselves as being responsible for teaching basic literacy skills” (Gillespie & Rasinski, 1989)” (Valleley & Shriver, p. 86).

What do high school readers struggle with the most?  Skinner and Shapiro (1989) reported that struggling high school readers tend to be slow but accurate decoders, and this laborious reading can lead to comprehension difficulties (Valleley and Shriver, 2003).  This dysfluent reading poses a compounded problem for secondary students because they are expected to read more material more quickly.

 Spurred by the need to help secondary readers, Valleley and Shriver (2003) conducted a study to examine the effectiveness of RR with secondary struggling readers’ fluency on grade level passages (ninth grade), and instructional passages (4^th grade) and on generalization passages from their English or social studies texts.    The effects of fluency improvement through RR on comprehension were also explored.        They defined fluency as a measure of the speed and accuracy of one’s reading.  The participants were four high school students at a residential treatment facility for boys in the Midwest.  These students were nominated by teachers and caseworkers on the basis of perceived reading difficulties.  From the nominated participants, the 4 chosen had reading rates at least at 30-50 WCPM less than a comparison sample.  Their Total Reading Standard scores on the Woodcock Reading mastery Tests-Revised (source) were below 85.   Participants were Caucasian (2) and African-American (2) with a range of learning disabilities including LD in reading, LD in reading and math, LD in reading math, and written language, and mentally-handicapped mild range.  One participant was dropped from the study due to non-compliance, though he continued for 3 weeks.

Valleley and Shriver (2003) explained that the participants lived on campus with house parents and attended a local public school at the time of the study.  They were placed in the treatment facility for behavioral and academic reasons.  The RR intervention occurred three times a week, twenty minutes each time, at the education building on campus.  A comparison group consisted of 4 boys with average reading ability for the same residential treatment facility and high school.  The authors chose average readers as a comparison group to provide “an estimate of how accurately youth in high school were reading since nominative data did not exist in the district” (p. 58).  Participants in the comparison group were also nominated; their Total Reading Standard score was between 90 and 110.  3 of the comparison students were African American and 2 were Caucasian.  They used the Timed Readings Series (Spargo, 1989) to do the RR intervention and for the ninth grade pre-and post-test, as well as for a cloze procedure.  This series is graded in ability from grades 4 through college level, and each level has 50 400 word passages.  At the end of each passage are 10 multiple choice comprehension questions, factual and inference, with three answer choices. 

Valleley and Shriver (2003) intended to have the RR treatment group participate in the intervention using texts at their instructional reading level.  However, none of the 4 participants could meet the instructional level of 144 WCPM and answer 8 comprehension questions correctly at any level of the reading series, they started at grade 4 although this level was too difficult.  As Allington (2009) stresses, a key to successful RR implementation is the difficulty-level of the text.  Students need to at least be reading instructional level texts if not independent level ones, and this text-reader mismatch was a major limitation of this study.

Valleley and Shriver (2003) measured fluency using the WCPM construct, and these fluency measures were only recorded during the initial readings.  Comprehension was measured with multiple-choice questions on the Timed Reading Passages, with recall questions on the generalization passages, and with cloze readings for the ninth grade passages.   Students read three fourth grade passages each week during baseline, and the RR procedure consisted of the students rereading the same passage for one minute until they achieved three consecutive fluency improvements, consisting of 1 WCPM improvement or more.  During the sessions, errors were not corrected, but a word was provided if the student didn’t say a word or move on after 3 seconds.  Every 3^rd passage, they read the entire 400 words so they could answer the multiple choice questions.  Also, this method kept participants from being trained to read for comprehension the 1^st time and for speed subsequent times. Once the 4^th grade passages were completed, participants read 5^th grade passages   Students were pre and post-tested using fluency measures. 

Valleley and Shriver (2003) found that each participant’s highest WCPM took place during intervention.  All 3 of the remaining participants decreased the WCPM gap from pre-test to post-test.  On the generalization probes, the RR treatment group improved reading speed while the companion group made no gains.  From baseline to intervention, the treatment group didn’t experience comprehension gains, and the authors concluded: “With only ten additional hours of repeated readings, each of the participants experienced gains in reading fluency on all measures….demonstrated with the intervention passages, ninth grade reading passages, and passages from their curriculum” (p. 70).  Only one didn’t have higher WCPM rates during intervention, perhaps because this phase was slow and he may have had motivational issues; however, he did increase his WCPM rates by about 15 words and made gains on the 5^th and 9^th grade passages and the curriculum passages.  The authors conclude that RR is a viable intervention for this population.

Deno et al. (2004) found that both regular and special education beginning readers are expected to gain WCPM weekly.  The authors posit that “for secondary students, it seems logical that changes in WPM-C [WCPM] would not occur for average readers since fluency improvements are no longer the focus of reading” (p. 72) and the comparison group, by making no fluency gains on 9^th or curriculum passages support this view.  However, the participants meet or exceeded this weekly gain.  However, for these struggling high school readers, RR didn’t improve comprehension perhaps because readers “may need specific instruction related to the novel vocabulary in a content area to make sense of the text” (p. 72).  The authors suggest “it may take longer than ten hours of repeated readings for measurable comprehension gains” (p. 72); and lamented that one of the limitations of the study was the “…short length of the study….Had the participants engaged in the repeated readings for an extended amount of time, comprehension gains may have been more apparent” (p. 74). However, Allington (2009) contends that shorter RR interventions are best.  They concede that “starting the participants at a reading level above their instructional level may have limited the effectiveness of fluency gains” (p. 73) which was one of several limitations. 

There was no control group in Valleley and Shriver’s (2003) study, (doing a different type of reading for the same amount of time), although the authors support that decision based on the controversial finding of the NRP in 2000 that “the panel was unable to find a positive relationship between programs and instructions that encourage large amounts of independent reading and improvements in reading achievement, including fluency” (as quoted un Valleley & Shriver, 2003, p. 73).  A final limitation of the study was the small sample, and another study would be needed to support their findings that RR is an effective fluency treatment for struggling secondary readers. 

Wexler, Vaughn, Edmonds, and Reutebuch (2008) conducted a synthesis of fluency interventions for secondary readers, denoting:

 Fluency is a critical element for many older students with reading difficulties….[Fluency] is essential for older students because: (a) students with reading difficulties consistently struggle with this specific component of reading (Lyon & Moats, 1997; Meyer & Felton, 1999; Torgesen et al., 2001; Torgesen, Wagner & Rashotte, 1997), (b) fluency is often neglected in reading instruction (Allington, 1983), and (c) reading words correctly and at an appropriate speed is associated with comprehension and learning from text (Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; Shinn & Good, 1992) (p. 318).

This synthesis summarized the research on the efficacy of fluency interventions for struggling secondary readers, identified as those in grades 6-12.  Studies examined were conducted between 1980 and 2005.  In order for the studies to be included, they had to include struggling readers in grades 6-12, use treatment-comparison, single group, or single subject designs, had to use a fluency intervention with a comprehension and or fluency outcome, and the language of instruction had to be English.

Wexler et al. examined 19 studies; of these, only two met the gold standard of using a treatment-control design, having treatment integrity, and collecting data with standardized measures.  Wexler et al. determined that “repeated reading seems to improve rate on practice passages, passages that share a high degree of word overlap, or intervention related tasks, but gains from repeated readings do not necessarily generalize to other reading tasks such as passage comprehension and word attack skills” (p. 342).  They found that in studies showing RR positively impacting rate, the number of rereading ranged from 1-7, though, according to Meyor and Felton (1999) the general consensus is that a passage should be reread 3-4 times to optimally impact fluency and comprehension (Wexler et al.).  Therrien (2004) determined that 4 rereadings was better than 3, and that studies requiring students to reach certain criteria, such as WCPM, were more effective than a specific number or rereading (Wexler et al.).  RR improves reading rate, although participants didn’t make the same comprehension and word reading accuracy gains as participants who read the same amount of text without repeating (eg. Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985; Homan et al., 1993).  Few interventions resulted in better comprehension.  RR with modeled fluent reading produced better gains.  Most studies used narrative text even though secondary students often read expository text, which can be more complex.  Regardless of exceptionality type, RR proved beneficial and could help all struggling secondary readers increase their reading rates.  No ELLs were indicated as being included in the 19 studies examined, so further research with this population is needed.                   

RR Intervention Studies with ELLs

RR vs. ER.

            Citing a lack of data concerning RR and ELLs, Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, and Gorsuch (2004) conducted a study to determine the effects of assisted repeated reading (RR) and extensive reading (ER) on ELLs’ fluency development.  The participants who volunteered were 20 Japanese students learning English at a university near Tokyo, 5 male and 15 female. They were first year Japanese linguistic students with 5 90 minute English classes a week, focusing on the domains of reading, writing, including grammar, speaking, and listening.  Half were assigned to the RR group and half to the ER group after they were matched based on the reading and total scores of the TOEFL test.

In Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, and Gorsuch (2004) study a follow-up to their 2002 study lasting 10 weeks, two graded readers (level 5) from the Heinemann New Wave Readers series were segmented into sections of between 334 and 608 words for the 42 repeated reading sessions.  24 of the sessions were dedicated to The Missing Madonna, and 18 were spent reading Away Match.  The first book, 31 pages in length, was completed and 26 pages of the second, Away Match, were read.  The RR group read 57 pages, 16, 963 words total.  These 57 pages were read five times during the treatment.  The ER group were allowed to chose from 83 graded readers: 27 were level 5 books, 22 were elementary-level, and 34 were intermediate level, all from the Heinemann New Wave Readers.  Students’ records indicate that the extensive reading group read between 733 minutes and 901 minutes during the sustained silent reading time.  These ER participants finished 3 to 6 books, reading from between 147 to 337 pages. The groups were given a pretest and a posttest.  Approximately 1/3 of each regularly scheduled English class was devoted to either RR or ER.  In each RR session, participants were cued to read for speed and comprehension, the prior passage was re-read as a refresher, students timed their first reading of a passage, they read the passages twice while listening to the text on audio, they read it twice more silently, timing each of these times, they wrote a report at the end of each session, and they charted their progress.

Between the first and the last session, the RR group experienced a steady increase in rate, supporting the hypothesis that RR is an effective fluency development tool with ELLs. Overall, within sessions, the fifth reading was faster than the first.  The RR group had a slightly higher WPM rate than did the ER group, suggesting that the two methods are comparable in developing fluency.  Both groups increased comprehension, showing ER and RR to be comparable.  Qualitative data was also collected from both groups in the form of a questionnaire and comments made on record sheets, and indicated that both methods provided more motivation to read longer texts.  Both groups noted gains in strategies for dealing with unknown words and that being provided access to large amounts of L2 input had a positive impact on their language acquisition, citing vocabulary growth as evidence.  5 RR participants commented that the repeated readings of passages helped them understand the story and the details.  One commented that knowing the passage would be read again was reassuring.  8 of 10 RR participants commented that the audio tapes helped with understanding the text, helped their conversational English, and helped with the pronunciation of unknown words.  No transfer effects were reported for the RR group; the repeated readings of texts did not lead to the understanding of new texts better.  Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, and Gorsuch (2004) concluded that RR can provide distinctive scaffolding for these ELL readers, and emphasized that because fluency improved within RR treatments and from pre- to post-test, the method improved word recognition and comprehension, and therefore RR could be a substantial method of facilitating ELLs’ fluency.

The Fluent Reader Program and ELLs’ Fluency.

            Willcutt (2004) tested the effects of the Fluent Reader Program on ELLs’ fluency.  She used an experimental design.  The elementary teachers at 2 schools in St. Paul and Minneapolis district picked the 12 lowest readers, and 6 were randomly assigned to Accelerated Reader (AR) or to Fluent Reader (FR). The study involved 72 elementary students, 36 third graders, 36 fourth graders, and 24 sixth graders.  Of the subjects, 29 were ELL, 14 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group).  All students were pretested using CBM level passages, which tracked WCPM and comprehension, and Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR), a program that determines the child’s “readability level” for AR and FR.  The treatment lasted ten weeks.  The experimental group used AR for 30 minutes and FR for 20 minutes; whereas the control group used AR for 30 minutes and then had regular reading instruction. 

According to Willcutt (2004) FR, distributed by Renaissaince Learning, is a computer program based on reading fluency research.  Students 1. Select passages of varying readability levels, 2. Read these passages repeatedly, 3. Have their performances scored (and graphed) by the computer based on WPM, 4. Click on unknown vocabulary for the definition and pronunciation. The passages cover a variety of topics, and students can choose to listen to modeled oral reading at a slow, somewhat fluent, or fluent rate.  They can also record themselves reading orally, which enables them to replay the audio and self-correct.  In this manner, both oral and visual modalities are employed.

  After 10 weeks, the post-test was administered, and Willcutt (2004) found that ELLs using FR had significantly higher gains in WPM than those in the control group, “suggesting that reading rate performance improved with the treatment” (p. 25).  Willcutt concluded that through FR, because it provides more comprehensible input (exposure) to the language, students learn more about the language structure and gain more vocabulary knowledge.  Because ELLs “need much more exposure and repetition than native speakers do, repeated reading is especially hepful for this group of students” (p. 13).

RR:  Fluency and Comprehension with ELLs

             Gorsuch and Taguchi (2007), spurred by the weak comprehension measures in their 2004 study, examined the effects of RR on silent reading rates and comprehension using an 11-week quasi-experimental study of 3^rd year university level Vietnamese ELLs.  The experimental group was comprised of 24 students, 6 males and 18 females, with a mean age of 22.  The control group consisted of 13 males and 13 females, with a mean age of 21.78.  Members of both groups were the students with the highest English proficiency at their school in their year.  A cloze-test pretest to check pretreatment group equivalence showed that the experimental group started with a lower reading ability. 

Gorsuch and Taguchi (2007) created a short answer comprehension test by breaking “Two Men Visit” (Young, 1971, as cited in Gorsuch & Taguchi) into two texts, 578 words and 565 words respectively.  The 578 word text became form A of the test and the 565 word text was designated form B.  Form A’s Flesch-Kincaid grade level readability was 2.7, and form B was graded 2.9.  The examiners developed 14 short answer items, asking questions about main ideas, supporting details, and details.  The 15^th question was an inference question.  The directions and questions were written in English and Vietnamese, and subjects could answer in either language.  For both groups, the test procedure was the same, and these procedures mirrored those of the RR sessions.  First, they read the passage once while self-timing, recording their WPM.  Then, the text was removed and the students answered the 15 items.  Next, the students read the passage a second and third time while listening to the audio model.  The fifth and sixth time, the text was read without audio support.  Finally, they were given a fresh copy of the questions which they reanswered.  

Gorsuch and Taguchi (2007) also created a recall pre and post test of comprehension.  They used “Man with No Name” (Davies and Town, 1992, as cited in Gorsuch & Taguchi), dividing this story into two parts.  Part A was 416 words (readability level 2.2) and part B was 429 words with a 2.3 readability level.  The test procedures were the same as for the short answer component, except that students were asked to recall everything they could about the story. For the pretest, the experimental group took Form A of the recall test and Form B of the short answer test and the control group took Form B of the recall test and Form A of the short answer test.

The experimental group had 16 RR sessions in eleven weeks during their regular English skills class.  During each session, they read approximately a 500 word short story while self-timing and recorded their time on a log sheet.  They read the text the 2^nd and 3^rd time with audio support, the 4^th and 5^th time without, and timed themselves on the fifth time, also recording that rate.  At the end of each session, they wrote short reports about the story in their choice of English or Vietnamese.  The reading done in RR was contiguous, so that stories were read in chunks but in order, and then the next story was begun.  The texts used for RR were three easy short stories from a graded reader (“A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” and “The Boscombe Lake Mystery”) that were segmented into 16 pieces from between 274-670 words with a mean length of 526 words.  Their readability level was approximately 2.8, though the texts were labeled by the publisher as pre-intermediate and having a vocabulary range of 1200 words.  These materials had an accompanying audiotape used during the treatment. 

 The groups took the opposite forms as a post-test at the end of the study, and interestingly, there were dips and rises in the rates between the sessions where new stories with less shared vocabulary are begun.  Within sessions, the average fluency increase was 105.23 WPM from the first to the fifth reading of a text for the RR group, and from pre-test to post-test, there was an average increase of 55 WPM, confirming the findings of Taguchi et al. (2004) that RR is a viable instructional tool for facilitating ELLs’ fluency development. However, the experimental group did not make significant comprehension gains even though they read at approximately the same rate as the control group.  Even so, on both pre-tests, the control performed better than the treatment group on the comprehension measures; on the post-tests, the treatment group well out-performed the control group.  Although the fluency gains (unlike the previous studies) of the experimental group didn’t transfer to the first readings of post-tests or differ significantly from the control, comments made by the experimental group on their post-test provide an explanation.  All subjects from the RR group commented that they read with close attention to detail because they knew they would have to answer questions at the end.  They also noted that when rereading, they looked for specific info to answer the questions each time.  On the recall test, they commented that they read with special attention paid to the sequence of events so they could do well on the retelling task. Even though their gains were not significant, the RR group comprehended more of the post tests on the 1^st and 5^th reading than did the control groups, whereas before treatment, they comprehended significantly less.  The authors situate their findings in automaticity theory, explaining that as the treatment group learned more sight words through the repeated reading of the texts with shared vocabulary, they had more attentional resources available for higher order comprehension processes.  In addition, “That the experimental group read more slowly than they were capable of in order to do well on the comprehension post-tests also suggests use of metacognitive strategies, suggesting support for Verbal Efficiency Theory” (p. 267), and comments made by both groups after pre and post tests confirm that these processes were used.  In ELL settings, “where a paucity of acquisition-friendly L2 input is likely to be an issue in the decades to come, RR offers an effective method to help readers become independent” (p. 269).  As a limitation, the authors lamented the shortness of the study, and they also found the pre and post test to have different difficulty levels.

Assumptions:

Implications for Further Research:

            Although still murky, the fluency picture is becoming clearer.  Researchers are beginning to understand more about the reading process, and, as a result, about the delicate interplay of decoding, vocabulary, pronunciation, speed, phrasing, and comprehension.  Repeated reading is a widely accepted method of fluency development for native English speakers, especially those below grade 6.  However, research has shown the effectiveness of RR (Valleley & Shriver, 2003; Wexler, Vaughn, Edmonds, and Reutebuch , 2008) and the necessity of fluency development (Rasinski, Padak, McKeon, Wilfong, Friedauer, and Heim, 2005)  with secondary struggling readers.  Because ELL secondary students struggle mightily with reading proficiency (Au, 2006) it is essential that fluency be developed (Lesaux, Geva, Koda, Siegel, & Shanahan, 2008).  Krashen’s (1985) input hypothesis explains that ELLs need “comprehensible input” in order to be able to acquire and understand the language.  Repeated reading increases the volume of reading, which is essentially increasing input (Chomsky, 1978).  If this input consists of, as Allington (2009) suggests, “home-run” books, it will be comprehensible, and it can help bridge the gap many ELLs have, perhaps as a result of their oral language development.  In the words of Lesaux and colleagues,

Practitioners are desperate for information about how to best serve older immigrant students, particularly those who have experienced poor or interrupted schooling, whose first-language academic skills are low or intermediate, and who come from language and schooling backgrounds about which little is known.  A much greater focus on postprimary second-language learners is needed to provide a research basis for improved practice in the middle and secondary grades (p. 288).

Also, as Allington (2009) pointed out, few studies of repeated readings had control groups reading independently for the same amount of time and the proposed study will do that.

Method:

Population:

            The sample will consist of ELLs and EC students placed in two secondary reading classes.  For ELLs, this placement was made on the basis of their 8^th grade reading EOG scores.  Of the 21 ELLs in the reading classes, all but 20 scored a level 2 on this test, with level 3 being grade level.  1 scored a level 1.  I am unsure of how these students will be distributed amongst the two classes, and I am unsure of how many EC students will be in the courses and on what basis.  I intend to use one class as the control and the remaining class as the treatment group; thus, the sample will be a convenience sample.  Of the 21 known members of the course, 18 are first-time freshmen, 1 is a repeating freshman, and 2 are sophomores who were new to US schools last year.  The nationalities represented are Hmong, Filipino, Mexican, and Guatemalan.  There are 9 males and 12 females.  These students attend a small (approximately 750 students), rural, southern high school in a district that is high-poverty.   Because groups are pre-existing and presumably unequal, this study will employ a non-equivalent pre-test and post-test control group design.

Variables and Sources of Data:

The treatment variable is peer-assisted repeated readings (RR). Another independent variable is participant’s attitude towards reading pre-intervention.  A final independent variable is the literacy level in a student’s native language.  The dependent variable being measured is fluency.  Control variables are years in U.S. schools, ELL proficiency level in the domain of reading, and instructional reading level. The confounding variable is the home language spoken.

Pre and Post test.  Prior to intervention, all participants will be asked to write a “Reader’s Autobiography” a (see appendices for assignment and example) and to complete a reading attitude survey (see appendices) in which they explore their literacy attitudes and development.  This essay will be written in class and at home with the guidance of discussion, models, and rubrics provider by the examiner and the TA.  All students will be pre-tested using a modified version of the Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) used at Appalachian State University’s reading clinic (more about this technique can be read in The Howard Street Tutoring Manual, by Darrel Morris, 2005).  This process involves having students read leveled passages starting at the kindergarten level and ending when it is evident that they have reached frustration, determined by the number of errors they make with word recognition, also known as accuracy.  The modified version entails one minute probes, rather than students reading each passage to completion. Students are tested on these passages both orally, and then, with a separate set of passages, silently.  They are timed while they read both orally and silently, and a rate, based on the number of words they read per minute, is recorded.  When oral reading, the examiner will mark the errors made:  omissions, insertions, word reversals, misreading, help (where they pause and the examiner “gives” them the word) and self-corrections.  At the end of each passage both orally and silently, students will be asked to respond orally to a series of comprehension questions.  They will not be able to look back at passages for answers.  ASU’s Word Recognition Inventory (WRI) will also be administered.  This test involves flashing a series of 20 words per grade level from grades 1-8 for ¼ of a second.  The student must then respond by saying the correct word.  If they hesitate or miss the word, the word is shown again, untimed, to give the student a chance to use decoding skills to figure the word out.  The number of correct words identified timed and untimed is recorded for each level (This program is available in an online format at http://services.rcoe.appstate.edu/wri/index.aspx ; see appendices for list of words/score sheet).  Finally, as a group, the class will be administered a graded spelling test, the Qualitative Inventory of Word Knowledge Short Form (QISF) (Schlagal 2003), comprised of 12 words per difficulty level grades k-8 (see appendices for word lists 1-6).  These words will be graded as correct or incorrect, and then the quality of misspellings will be examined to paint a clear picture of the student’s reading ability. The QISF was proven an effective assessment of word knowledge with ELLs by Palmer (2004). All of this information will be evaluated together to determine the student’s grade level ability of reading on the basis of  oral and silent reading rates, oral reading accuracy, oral and silent reading comprehension, automatic word knowledge, and spelling knowledge (see appendices for calculations to determine instructional level using these measures).  These measures also determine the student’s fluency, as determined by rate, accuracy, and comprehension. The same procedure will be followed post-test, using a similar series of graded passages.  The same words will be flashed, and the same words will be spelled after the intervention.  NC Wise will be used to collect information such as ELL language proficiency in reading.  Students’ cumulative records will be used to trace the home language spoken and years in US schools.  Students will be given a survey about their literacy in their native languages (see appendices).

Intervention measures.  During intervention, data for the treatment group will be collected after each reading.  A problem that has persisted since the development of RR as a fluency intervention is how to accurately assess this multi-faceted construct.  As Samuels (1979, 1997) noted thirty years ago, “Currently we do not have tests suitable for classroom use which would tell us if a student is at the automaticity stage, so we have to settle for what may be called indicators of automaticity” (p. 379), such as accuracy and speed (rate), but speed should be emphasized in Samuels’s opinion.  Why emphasize speed?  Samuels argues that there is a trade-off between accuracy and speed:  the faster one reads, the less accurate they are and vice versa.  Samuels also fears that overemphasizing accuracy will cause students to be too fearful of making mistakes, a problem that could actually hinder fluency development.  Torgesen and Hudson defend the use of rate as a measurement of fluency: “For students at all levels—but particularly for students at beginning stages of learning to read—oral reading rate is strongly correlated with students’ ability to comprehend both simple and complex text” (p. 130).

To balance attention to speed and accuracy, words correct per minute (WCPM), as advocated by Allington (2009) as one optimal Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) fluency test, will be tracked between each re-reading.  The WCPM procedure used will be a blend of Running Records (Clay, 1985) and WCPM as conceived by Deno (1985) in that correct words read will be indicated by a check mark per word on a blank piece of paper, rather than involve these errors being tracked on photocopied text, as the original WCPM method dictated.  To determine the WCPM, count the number of correct words and graph the results (Allington, 2009).  (These performances will be graphed per child per reading (see appendices for graph).  Data for the control group will be collected on SSR (silent-sustained reading) logs, which will require the student to write the name of the text, the author, and the page numbers read each day.

Data Collection Techniques:

                  The data collection for this study will consist of mixed methods, embracing the concurrent embedded strategy, entailing that both data sets be collected simultaneously (Creswell, 2009).  The qualitative data will be embedded within the quantitative data, and will seek to determine the roles of student attitudes towards reading, students’ first language, and students’ first language literacy on fluency development when receiving the peer-assisted RR intervention.   The study will last for nine weeks, as this is the maximum time Allington (2006, 2009) and Hiebert (2006) recommend using RR as a fluency intervention to countermand negative effects such as limited exposure to various vocabulary and syntax.

First, I will secure the permission of parents to use their child in my study.  Next, and prior to the start of classes, I will collect information about students from NC Wise and their cumulative folders, such as years in U.S. schools, 8^th grade reading EOG score, and native language spoken in the home, as well as ages and WIDA ACESS proficiency levels in reading when available (EC students will not have scores for this last measure, nor will many of them, unless they are ELL as well, have another language spoken in the home.  These facts will be recorded on a chart by category.  On the first day of class, I will administer a survey to all ELL students in the two reading classes to ascertain their literacy levels in their native language.  This data will also be aggregated in the same categorical chart.  The next step would be for me to introduce students to the writing assignment, “The Reader’s Autobiography” (adapted from Burke, 2000) and the prewriting activity for this assignment is the Reading Attitude survey that will also be administered post-test. These essays will be examined and coded thematically, and reading attitudes pre and post intervention will be examined (and reported anecdotally) as a method of examining the change (if any) in attitude as well as the prevailing attitudes of EC and ELL struggling readers in this context.

  While students are writing their essays about good and bad literacy experiences of their lives, first books read, embarrassing moments and successful moments with reading, and about their attitudes towards reading, I will administer IRIs and WRIs individually.  These inventories take approximately 20 minutes per student, so the preliminary testing will take roughly 5 days, assuming 8 students (4 per class) is tested daily, and the total number of students in the two classes are 30-35.  I will try to expedite the process and maximize class time by testing students during my planning period as well.  In addition to working on essays, while I am testing other students, students will be engaged with whole group read-alouds of a novel, Tears of a Tiger, by Sharon Draper (1994), as well as with instructional activities related to this multi-genre text.

            Once individual testing is complete, I will administer the QISF to both classes.  I will analyze the IRIs daily, so that by the end of testing I will be able to group students by reading ability for spelling and reading instruction.  Once they have their instructional reading levels, students in the control group will be ready to begin SSR, and students in the experimental group will be ready for repeated readings.  As recommended by Samuels (1997), direct instruction concerning the method will be provided on the first day.  I will discuss its purpose, perhaps using a sports metaphor about how practice leads to improvement, so that the student understands the necessity of rereading.

            For the peer-assisted repeated reading process, I will use the TA to model the procedure on the first day. She and I will go through the process, explicating it as we work together.  The process, based on best practices found in the literature, will be as follows:

1.      All students will be randomly paired with a peer for the duration of the intervention because receiving some sort of assistance during RR improved fluency and comprehension (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003), and Samuels (1997) suggests using teacher assistants and peers to assist by listening to the reading, recording the accuracy and speed, helping with decoding, and/or providing fluent models of the text.  

2.      As recommended by Allington (2009) and Samuels (1997), the passages will be selected from books students self-select to read (at their instructional level) and will progress in order through the text.  Reading slightly challenging texts versus easy texts was found more effective in a Kuhn and Stahl’s synthesis of RR research, which is why students will read from instructional level texts rather than independent level.   (Pressley, Gaskins, & Fingeret, 2006).  Prior to the sessions, the student will locate a passage within the book he/she is reading and will count off and mark (lightly in pencil) the number of words in the passage, writing the number of words every 25 words or so.  This will expedite the WCPM measure considerably.  

3.     The student will underline unknown words (pronunciation and/or meaning) in the selected passage and the teacher (or peer) will discuss those words with the student because this method can promote vocabulary development, especially problematic for ELLs (Allington, 2009; Topping, 2006).   

4.     Prior to reading, based on the student’s typical reading rate, the student and teacher (or peer) will determine a WCPM  criterion, and the student will read the passage repeatedly (for one minute each time) until this criterion is met.  For students substantially below grade level, Allington recommends setting the WCPM criterion 10-20 WPCM above the current reading rate of the student and raising that goal with each session.

5.      Then, the student will read the passage once, while the teacher (or peer) times the performance and tracks accuracy and fluency. 

6.     The teacher or peer charts the WCPM after each rereading.  Use graphing as a motivational component provides “visible proof of progress” (Samuels, 1997). 

7.     When criterion is reached, the re-reading ends. (Allington and others recommend using criterion rather than a set number of rereading based on research findings implicating that this method is best.)

            Each day the peer-assisted repeated reading process will last 20 minutes.  The second day, roles will switch, and the peer who did not read the day before will read this day.

            Graphs of WCPM per student will be analyzed for trends from the 1^st session of RR to the last session of RR, as well as from the 1^st and final rereading within sessions.  The average oral reading rates of RR participants for the first and final re-readings of all sessions will be calculated in order to compare pre-intervention WCPM with post-intervention WCPM.  Descriptive statistics will be used to analyze pre-test and post-test results.

            In the control group, to ensure that students do not have extra time spent reading in comparison to the treatment group, SSR will occur for 20 minutes every other day.  Also, students will be encouraged to note unknown vocabulary by asking for pronunciation and a definition from the teacher as they read to balance the vocabulary development that will occur as part of the treatment. These students will log the title of the book read each day, the author, starting and ending pages and sentence numbers.  They can switch books at will, as long as they are reading within their instructional reading level.

                 At the end of the nine week treatment period, students in both groups will have read 460 minutes, or 61.63 hours over the course of 23 sessions.  Both groups will be given a short reading attitude survey to take at the end of the intervention, and this data will be compared with initial reading attitudes as explicated in the autobiographical essay and the initial responses to questions 1-10 of this survey as used as a pre-writing measure.  This data will be compiled into a chart and compared to the pre-intervention responses.

            If a student is absent from a RR or SSR session, a makeup session will be scheduled.

Limitations of the Study:

            This study is limited by the nature of the groups.  The classes are static and the experimenter will have no control over placement in groups.  Thus, random assignment of the population into groups will not be possible.  Also, in order to allow each student to read at his/her instructional level, and due to a lack of access to standardized graded passages, students will be reading self-selected texts at their reading level from the classroom library (coded by Accelerated reader (AR) level.  Therefore, the text difficulty will differ per student.  However, this condition most closely resembles that of true classroom conditions.  Another limitation is that data will not be collected using norm-based, standardized measures, primarily because there are few (if any) good measures of reading fluency available. The same form of the QSIF and WRI will be given pre-and post-test; however, the intervention period of nine weeks will provide ample time for the students to not remember these items.  A final limitation is limited resources and time.  Because it is not feasible for each student in the treatment group to work one-on-one with the teacher or TA during the process of RR, the peer-assisted method of repeated readings is being used.  However, adult-assisted repeated reading has been shown to be the optimal procedure (Pressley, Gaskins, & Fingeret, 2006).  Because students are working together rather than with a teacher, comprehension measures are being taken only pre and post test, rather than within each RR session to avoid reliability issues.  However, if growth in comprehension occurs, it should show up on the post-test.

Appendices

Reader’s Autobiography Writing Assignment

Stories help us understand the world and ourselves.  Reading is a PERSONAL experience.  We all enter the world of reading in our early years—but many of us lose sight of the pleasure we once found in reading or being read to.  Writing a READER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY allows us to retrace the steps of our reading life and identify the events and people that helped turn us on/off to reading.

WHAT TO DO:

1.      Using the reading attitudes surveys we completed in class and our class discussions on good/bad readers as pre-writing, write your own reader’s autobiography.  Choose one of the following ways to complete this assignment.

A.      Paper format—Write a 5 paragraph paper that explores your growth as a reader.  ( 2 pages)

B.     Literacy Timeline.  Create a visual timeline of your experiences with reading and writing.  Include key moments.  Be creative and illustrate key events.  You must write a paragraph for each key event to explain the significance to your audience.

C.     Presentation.  Bring in books, articles, and poems that are your favorite.  Give a 3-5 minute presentation to the class, explaining when you first learned to read, who taught you, what your favorite books were as a child, when you have struggled as a reader, your most embarrassing reading moment, etc.  You will need to use notecards for your presentation.  Also, your speech will need an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.

2.     When writing your paper, think about the following things:

*Family experiences.  Perhaps family members read to you as a child or you saw others reading/writing.

*Good and bad experiences with teachers.

*Childhood insights and misconceptions about reading and writing.

*Friends or classmates who were better at reading and writing than you were.

*Strategies for reading that are successful/unsuccessful.

*Experiences with foreign language and literacy.

*Major breakthroughs and sudden insights.

*Attitudes toward reading and writing at different ages.

*favorite/least favorite books

*visits to bookstores/libraries

3.     When you finish, we will peer-edit these papers, discuss them in small groups and as a class.

DUE DATE_____________________________________________________________

Adapted from Jim Burke’s (2000) Reading Reminders:  Tools, Tips, and Techniques

Reader’s Autobiography Sample Student Paper

Dear ________,

“How has reading changed my life?”  My memory runs back to when I was seven years old.  “Ding Dong!”  My dad finally came home.

It was my birthday party.  I was waiting for him the whole day.  A week ago, he had told me that he would give me a big surprise on my birthday party.  “What will it be?  It must be that red skirt I saw in the shopping center!”  I’ve looked forward this moment for a week that I was almost impatient.

I immediately ran over to him.  He was very excited.  There was a careful wrapped box in his hand.  “Oh, my dear red skirt.  I finally have you.”  My heart was pumping.  Without my dad’s consent, I took over the box.

“Oh, no!”  My heart was sinking when I opened the box.  It was not the pretty skirt I’d longed for so long.  It was a BOOK!  I was like falling down from the top of the world.  “No, I never want the stupid book.  Where is my dress?” I cried out.  Tears were filled in my eyes.  I’ve waited for a week for the useless book.  I felt I’ve been cheated.  How can he give me the cheap. Nonsense book for my birthday gift?  He didn’t like me at all.  I would never read it.

At night, I can’t fall asleep.  Looking at the big book, my anger was running inside me.  It had ruined my party.  Why did dad lie to me and said it was a surprise to me?  Suddenly, I grew curiously:  “What is the book about?  Is it so evil that I hate it and want to tear it apart?”  I opened the book—Chinese and Foreign Stories—and read my first real story in my life.

                  There was a little virtuous duck.  It’s so ugly that nobody liked it.  It didn’t have any friends.  Every animal around the lake laughed at her wherever she went:  “Look at this little duck.  Get away from her.”  Comparing to her, her sister was as pretty as a princess.  Wherever she was, there were always friends around her.  They would say:  “Come here, dear.  Come in my house.”  One day, they were playing around the lake.  Suddenly, a little chick fell into the lake.  He shouted “Beauty, save me.”  The pretty duck shook her head selfishly:  “Why should I save you.  I can’t get anything.”  The ugly duck just passed by.  It saw what happened and jumped in the water bravely without a word.  It saved the chick.  From then on, everyone liked to play with the warm-hearted ugly duck.  The story ends with a motto, which I remembered most—“It’s the inside that counts the most,”

                  I was ashamed when I finished reading it.  I felt I was like one of the animals that only look at the outside of the things, but ignore what they really are.  I liked the red skirt because it was pretty.  But pretty outfit can’t cover my inside.  Only the knowledge can fill my mind.  And reading is one way to get the knowledge.

                  I moved on to the next story….I was deeply attracted.  I can’t put the book down anymore.  I kept reading.  I read during the break of the class.  I read as soon as I got home.  Soon, I had a habit—I can’t go to sleep unless I read some pages.  Like what my mom said, “I fell in love with reading.”

                  I fell deeply in love with the beautiful earth when I read “Our Home—Our Earth.”  I decided to preserve the earth like the guards who fight against bad people destroying the earth.  I cried for Cinderella when she was tortured by her wry sisters.  And I can’t stop laughing at funny action of the little bear when it danced.

                  I read, and I learned.  My mind was not empty with only pretty dress anymore.  I was filled by books and knowledge.  I began to understand what is true beauty, and to realize our burden as the residents on the earth.

                  As I grew up, my knowledge grew.  I had regretted what I did wrong when I was young.  But I never regretted to pick up the book on my birthday night.  It’s that moment I began to open the door lying between me and the wonderful world, people and knowledge.  It’s reading that helps me find my true self and our value of living.  I am still reading.  When I get home after a day’s tire work, my first hope is to lie down on the sofa, and read a book a while.  It’s the only time I can forget all the unhappiness.  At that time, my book and I are the only two existing on earth.  Every time when my dad asks me what I want most for my birthday present, I say it without thinking:  “I want books.  I want to read.”

                                                                        Sincerely,

                                                                        Grace Zheng

                                                                        High school ESL student                    from Jim Burke’s (2000) Reading Reminders:  Tools, Tips, and     Techniques

Abbott, BYU, 2002
Reading Attitude Survey
Directions:
This is a survey that describes how you feel about reading. Please circle the answer that best describes your feelings toward reading.
SD - Strongly Disagree D - Disagree U - Undecided A - Agree SA - Strongly Agree

1.      When I have free time, I am more likely to pick up a book than turn on the television.  SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

2.     One of my favorite pastimes, is walking around a bookstore looking at all the books.    SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

3.     I like to read but literature is often too difficult to understand and read.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

4.     I only read when I have to.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

5.     I would rather have my teacher tell me what I need to know than read it.

SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

6.     I have a special spot where I go to read a book.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

7.     I only read magazines and comic books.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

8.     We have a lot of reading material in my home.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

9.     I cannot concentrate long enough to read a book.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

10.  My family never read things while I was growing up.
SD                        D                             U                                      A                                 SA

11.   In what ways has your attitude towards reading changed as a result of the nine weeks of intervention you just experienced?

12.  In what ways did the intervention help you as a reader?

13.  General comments:

Adapted from

http://english.byu.edu/Novelinks/reading%20strategies/ChamberOfSecrets/Reading%20Attitude%20Survey.pdf

ASU WORD RECOGNITION TEST   Level:  PP 1.   and     2.   cat 3.   me 4.   is 5.   go 6.   play 7.   where 8.   like 9.   thing 10. old 11. your 12. up 13. said 14. big 15. for 16. by 17. dog 18. not 19. who 20. here	Flash ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	Untimed ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	P:	1.   back 2.   eat 3.   sun 4.   bird 5.   pat 6.   saw 7.   feet 8.   lake 9.   hid 10. cut 11. about 12. one 13. rain 14. water 15. two 16. how 17. window 18. need 19. that’s 20. mother	Flash ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	Untimed ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
Score  % Correct				Score % Correct

Level: 1             Flash                 Untimed                        2                      Flash                Untimed

1.   leg 2.   black 3.   smile 4.   hurt 5.   dark 6.   white 7.   couldn’t 8.   seen 9.   until 10. because 11. men 12. winter 13. shout 14. glass 15. paint 16. children 17. table 18. stand 19. head 20. drove	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________		1.   able 2.   break 3.   pull 4.   week 5.   gate 6.   felt 7.   north 8.   rush 9.   wrote 10. perfect 11. change 12. basket 13. shoot 14. hospital 15. spill 16. dug 17. crayon 18. third 19. taken 20. prize	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
Score % Correct				Score % Correct

Level 3:                                                                         4

                                    Flash                Untimed                                                Flash                Untimed

1.   accept 2.   favor 3.   seal 4.   buffalo 5.   slipper 6.   receive 7.   legend 8.   haircut 9.   dresser 10. icy 11. customer 12. thread 13. plop 14. bandage 15. further 16. moat 17. closet 18. unroll 19. storyteller 20. yarn	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________		1.   average 2.   hamster 3.   select 4.   tobacco 5.   brilliant 6.   liberty 7.   prance 8.   solemn 9.   disease 10. impress 11. miracle 12. wrestle 13. coward 14. explode 15. opinion 16. suffer 17. vast 18. relationship 19. furnace 20. clan	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
Score % Correct				Score % Correct

Level 5                                                                                      6

1.   labor 2.   cripple 3.   hasten 4.   frontier 5.   riverbed 6.   settlement 7.   absent 8.   dissolve 9.   plea 10. surrender 11. organization 12. evidence 13. width 14. rampaging 15. horseshoe 16. breed 17. assorted 18. soybean 19. troublesome 20. circumstance	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________		1.   elevate 2.   conservation 3.   tenderness 4.   barrier 5.   adulthood 6.   kennel 7.   humiliated 8.   nonfiction 9.   revive 10. wallet 11. depression 12. carvings 13. similarity 14. unanswered 15. fingernail 16. grammar 17. marrow 18. starter 19. pedestrian 20. quantity	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
Score% Correct				Score % Correct

Level 7                                                                                   Level 8

1.   civic 2.   shirttail 3.   nominated 4.   gruesome 5.   disadvantage 6.   architecture 7.   tonic 8.   straightforward 9.   warrant 10. unthinkable 11. ridicule 12. engulf 13. kindhearted 14. maturity 15. impassable 16. bolster 17. copyright 18. foliage 19. prune 20. persecution	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________		1.   administration 2.   federation 3.   militia 4.   shambles 5.   bankrupt 6.   goldenrod 7.   perishable 8.   toddler 9.   cavernous 10. imperative 11. notorious 12. subconscious 13. corps 14. laborious 15. rivet 16. unimaginable 17. dizzily 18. irritability 19. puncture 20. wholehearted		________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________	________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
Score% Correct				Score% Correct

                                                                                               

Schlagal’s Qualitative Inventory of Spelling Short Form

Grade 1

1.      Trap

2.     Bed

3.     When

4.     Wish

5.     Sister

6.     Girl

7.     Drop

8.     Bump

9.     Drive

10.  Plane

11.  Ship

12.  Bike

Grade 2

1.      Train

2.     Thich

3.     Chase

4.     Trapped

5.     Dress

6.     Queen

7.     Cloud

8.     Short

9.     Year

10.  Shopping

11.  Cool

12.  stuff

Grade 3

1.      scream

2.     Noise

3.     Stepping

4.     Count

5.     Careful

6.     Chasing

7.     Batter

8.     Caught

9.     Thirsty

10.  Trust

11.  Knock

12.  Send

        Grade 4

1.      Popped

2.     Plastic

3.     Cable

4.     Gazed

5.     Cozy

6.     Scurry

7.     Preparing

8.     Stared

9.     Slammed

10.  Cabbage

11.  Gravel

12.  Sudden

Grade 5

1.      Explosion

2.     Justice

3.     Compare

4.     Settlement

5.     Measure

6.     Suffering

7.     Needle

8.     Preserve

9.     Honorable

10.  Lunar

11.  Offered

12.  Normal

Grade 6

1.      Mental

2.     Commotion

3.     Declaration

4.     Musician

5.     Dredge

6.     Violence

7.     Wreckage

8.     Decision

9.     Impolite

10.  Acknowledge

11.  Conceive

12.  Introduction

To calculate instructional level based on word flash:

Find the grade level where the student scored below 50%. Go to the score before (where the student scored 70% to 85%). That is the instructional reading level as indicated by the flash.

To calculate reading rate:

Number of words in passage x 60/student’s reading time in seconds

For example, if student read “The Tooth” in 1 minute 10 seconds (70 seconds):

242 x 60 = 14520/70 = 207 words per minute (rate)

To calculate reading accuracy:

Number of words in passage – errors/number of words in passage

For example, if student made 6 errors while reading “The Tooth”:

242 – 6 = 236/242 = 98 % accuracy

To calculate comprehension:

Number wrong                      Score

0                                                          100%

1                                                          80%

2                                                          60%

3                                                          40%

4                                                          20%

5                                                          0%

Oral Reading Rates Grade   Words per minute 1st                                45-85 2nd                               80-120 3rd                                95-135 4th                                110-150 5th                                125-155 6th                                135-160 7th                                145-160

Reading Accuracy                                                         Independent level         98-100%   Instruction level                       95-97% Gray Area                      95-97% Frustration level                       Below 90% *Note: 90-94% accuracy is marginal; take a close look at Rate.

From http://www.ltl.appstate.edu/reading_resources/criteria_measuring_fluency.htm

Language Background Survey

Please fill in the blank and/or circle your answers.
1.  My Native language is _____________________________________
2.   How well do you understand your Native language?
a. Understand everything someone says to me.
b. Understand most of the time.
c. Understand some words or phrases only
d. Not at all

3.   How well do you speak your Native language?
a. Fluently
b. Well enough to make myself understood.
c. Not very well: know words and phrases, but have a hard time making myself understood.
d. Not at all.
4.  I can read this language:                                                                                                                               a. YES, very well
b. YES, somewhat well
c.  NO

If you can read in your native language, how often do you?_________________________________
5.  I can write this language:

a. YES, very well
b.  YES, somewhat well
c.  NO

If you can write in your native language, how often do you do so?___________________________

 6. Where do you speak the language - --____ _____
Please write one of the following beside each choice.  Always Frequently Sometimes Never
a. Church ___________ ________ ________
b.  Community Center ____________________
c.  Home _________________
d.  At other family members’ homes___________
e.  At friends’ homes__________
f.  Wal-Mart or other stores__________
g.  school__________
h.  Other (please specify):___________________
7.  To whom do you speak your Native language? (list all that apply) _____________________________________________________________________________________

8. What language did you learn to speak first in the home?________________
9. Who taught you this language?___________________________________
10. If you learned a Native language first, when and where did you learn English?_________
11. How old were you? ________________

Survey adapted from the Seminole Nation Language Assessment Survey at http://www.seminolenation.com/Language%20Survey.pdf

Repeated Reading Chart         Name  ____________________________________

Beginning date ____________Ending date  _______________Title  ______________________________ Author_______________ Level_____________Goal  __________ WCPM _____________ %comprehension

200
190
180
170
160
150
140
130
120
110
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
WCPM	1              2                   3                   4            5

                  Number of Trials

 from

www.willoughby-eastlake.k12.oh.us/.../Guided%20Reading/.../Repeated%20Reading%20Chart.doc

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