Fluency and automaticity...

Improving reading comprehension is the plea of many parents when asking for help with their children's literacy.  "What can I do?"  The answer is: "A lot!"

Automaticity is, in short, the ability to automatically recognize (and understand) the words being read.  Fluency is, essentially, the ability to read smoothly, with no or minimal need to stop and decode words.  The problem many children have with comprehension is that they are spending too much time on word recognition (lacking automaticity), which directly affects fluency. When fluency is interrupted, holding the story bits in the mind is harder for the reader. In other words, if you are stopping to decode words frequently in a story book, your mental energy and focus is on the decoding, not on comprehending the plot.  The same is true with any genre of text.

Increasing the rate of both automaticity and fluency will help to improve reading comprehension.  They do not help with all factors of reading comprehension, such as language and background experience, but working on automaticity and fluency will go a long way toward helping reading comprehension.  Parents can do the same sort of "exercises" that teachers can (and hopefully) do in the classroom to help with building up automaticity and fluency.  In a way, working on them is like the calisthenics of reading comprehension.

Below are some automaticity and fluency exercises.  It is recommended that the texts used for the exercises are varied and initially new to the reader.  For the latter exercises, after a few sessions, even if a text is not completed, it is best to move on to another one.

• Choral Reading:  The idea here is to rehearse a text, just as you would a piece of music, with a group of readers who work out pace and expression.  As with any "choral" performance, the group can be divided into sections with different parts.  The idea is to convey meaning and build fluency in the reading from start to finish.  The practicing of the text helps improve both automaticity and fluency in a supportive environment where all finish the task as a strong reader of the text.  The emphasis on conveyed meaning mitigates any weaknesses of individual readers. 
• Paired Reading:  Two readers sit together with the same text.  They read in unison so that the single voice is strong and fluid.  If the weaker reader does not know a word, he/she is hearing the word as the pair continues to read.  The emphasis on teamwork mitigates the mistakes of the weaker reader, while the weaker reader has a role model to help achieve a successful reading of the text.
• Echo Reading: Two readers sit together with the same text. It is best to start with a text that is slightly easier than the reading level of the weaker reader.  The first reader starts reading the text and the second starts just after, as an echo. The idea is that the weaker reader is listening to what he is about to read and so has greater fluency in reading aloud.
• Repeated Reading: The idea is to read a text only so far until three mistakes are made. Once that happens, the reader starts again, with the aim of getting further before hitting the three mistake mark. Then, a third time. The point is not to finish the story, but to rehearse the text.  The repetition builds automaticity and fluency. 
• Timed Reading: Choose a time limit for the exercise before starting (perhaps 3 minutes, but this depends on both age and proficiency of the reader). Using a stop watch, have the reader get through as much text as possible before the time is up. As with Repeated Reading, you repeat the exercise, starting from the beginning, twice more. The goal is to build fluency from a faster word recognition rate with the repetition.
• Radio Reading:  The idea is to emphasis communication and expression over exact content.  The reader reads aloud the text to an audience with the direction to use expression and emphasis to convey meaning and with the freedom to making substitutions for words that are unfamiliar to the reader in order to keep up the pace of reading. 

Something to remember is that using a text is important, not necessarily using a book.  Texts are any form of written word.  Yes, book are likely to be the most convenient text to use with these exercises, but one key to supporting reading in struggling children, older youth, and even adults is to utilize texts with which the readers are comfortable.  That might be comic books, song lyrics, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, emails, blog posts, and even forms/applications to name a few types of texts.

The other key to success is participation by the stronger reader(s) ... or ... to put it another way: modeling.  Let the weaker reader be the one to start the reading, to use the timer, and to mark mistakes.  Being willing to be equal partners in literacy exercises demonstrates both the importance of literacy proficiency and that learning is truly a lifelong endeavor.

Reading Comprehension...

Reading Comprehension is a complex issue, with many moving factors.  That is why it is a very good practice for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grader teachers to do literacy assessments on their students at the beginning of the year to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each child in the classroom.  I am not in schools now, obviously, but when I was and when I was a professor, few teachers were systematically assessing their students to start the year.

This graphic that I rebuilt from my notes shows the three main areas that affect reading comprehension.  In the early grades, usually the emphasis is on word identification.  "Mediated" means working out what the word means and "immediate" means the reader knows the meaning of the word upon sight.  The way word identification most affects comprehension is that if the reader is spending more time on mediated efforts (does not know the words upon sight and has to decode them), then the ability to hold the meaning of the combination of all those words—the message—is compromised because too much mental energy is spent on decoding the words.

I am a huge advocate of Words on the Wall, both at home and at school.  The idea is to fill the walls with both spelling words and vocabulary words so that students are surrounded by them all the time.  This means that spelling tests are "open," with the ability to just look up on the wall to see how to spell a word.  In this environment, students can collectively decide when they have moved words from "mediated" to "immediate" and take the words they all know down off the walls to make room for new words.  Such emphasizes the importance of learning words and empowers the students with the responsibility and celebration of that learning.

When it comes to teaching words and words play, the GOLD STANDARD is Patricia Cunningham's Phonics They Use.

The other main emphasis educators take is on print processing.  For students raised in print rich homes with parents who regularly read to them, print processing knowledge is usually mastered before they arrive at school.  One cannot understate just how important it is for infants, toddlers, and young children to experience lap reading.  When an adult (or older sibling) reads to a child, that child is learning:

• Reading is a valuable and important activity.
• You open books to read them.
• Books are read from the front of the book to the back.
• The black marks on the page have meaning.
• Chunks of black marks are words.
• Words are read from left to right.
• Pages are read from top to bottom.
• Illustrations help portray meaning to the story.

I could go on, but you get the point.  Thus, students who come to kindergarten from print poor homes are handicapped in literacy development from the outset of their education.  Teachers focus on print processing, in addition to word recognition, because of its importance.  But, also, it is the easiest aspect of reading comprehension to teach.

Walk into any elementary classroom where there are books in abundance, a reading corner with comfortable pillows and such, words on the wall, student made books on the shelves, and student writing on the walls and you know that literacy development is important to that teacher.  If you see such a classroom, take the time to stop and thank the teacher for his/her literacy instruction efforts!

Such an approach, however, in not fully structured and, thus, can be more challenging with behavior management.  Allowing students to read to each other, to read in spare moments, to curl up in a reading corner or beneath a desk or any place desired means allowing students to control their learning environment.  For some teachers the lack of regimentation is uncomfortable.

For parents who do not see such freedoms in their classrooms, they can create that environment in the home to foster their child's literacy development.  They can emphasis story reading and story telling.  They can bring books and other texts with them to take any spare moments in their outings or on their errands to read or story tell.  They can have a spot in the house (usually best near the table) where spelling and vocabulary words can be posted on the wall.  They can also make use of a pocket chart to promote word play at home.

For those who practice religious instruction in their homes, they can incorporate word play in their religious lessons.  For example, if your children are learning a Bible verse, putting each word of the verse on a piece of sentence strip, mixing them up on a pocket chart or a table top, and then letting children put the words back into the proper order helps then both memorize the text and gain immediate word recognition for the words in that verse.

If you cannot afford a pocket chart and sentence strips, you can use index cards to play with words.  Or even scraps of paper, as show in the movie The Color Purple.  Visually labeling items with their words and having children interact with those words is a powerful, powerful literacy education activity.

That leaves language development.  This is the most difficult area to remediate when students have deficiencies in this area.  It is also, in my personal opinion, the most neglected area of literacy instruction.  With a society that has utterly devalued proper spelling, punctuation, and sentence construction, fostering language development has become even more difficult.

For parents with children who have literacy difficulties, get them assessed.  If the teacher does not do it, ask the school.  It is your right to have a professional assessment by the public school system if your student is struggling with literacy.  If you homeschool, then pursue the assessment yourself.  And, if the results show a difficulty in language processing, get professional help.  Barter or trade for it if need be.  That intervention will be the best investment you could ever make in the education of your child.

I hope this brief overview has at least provided a bit of insight to literacy instruction, if not food for thought for how you can help foster literacy development.  It is my hope to continue discussing these factors of reading comprehension as I pursue my goal of capturing what I still remember about literacy.

Literacy matters...

Literacy matters.  It really does.  Now, I know that social media shouts at you at every turn and in every possible way that it doesn't, but literacy does matter.

Sadly, the news media teaches you wrong lessons about literacy daily.  I mean, seriously, using fake words in titles to articles, such as "vols" or "photogs," makes me cringe and a part of my heart dies each and every time I see such egregious grammatical errors posted without thought for the harm they are doing to literacy in America.  And then there is Hollywood and marketing and just about every form of literacy out there for consumption.  I honestly doubt there is a single person in all those forms of media left who understands how to properly use pronouns or how to punctuate with quotation marks.  SIGH.

Newspapers, newsletters, television shows, movies, news websites, blog posts, tweets, etc.  are all filled with errors, even by professionals and those educated enough to not make them.  In fact, it's fashionable to be incorrect and a social media faux pas to use proper grammar.  But I hope that, one day, the tide will turn.  That, one day, people will, once more, value the craftsmanship of proper syntax, semantics, and vocabulary in literacy acts.

In the meanwhile, I would be truly grateful if we could just work on using the pronouns "who" or "whom" with antecedents that are people as opposed to the pronouns "that" or "which."  This is especially when your marketing campaign involves student activists.  Even if the student is the one who wrote the speech with the improper pronoun use, editing is a valuable tool and lesson for the student to learn.  [Yes, Unilever, I mean you!]

Ah, but I digressed.

Literacy is not merely reading, a mistake many people make.  Literacy is READING, WRITING, LISTENING, and SPEAKING.  Every single day, our lives are full of a plethora of literacy acts, that often include myriad texts.  Paying attention to them is important.  All literacy acts can be learning experiences and/or teachable moments.  Each literacy encounter informs all the ones that follow.

Take the literacy act of READING:  When parents would come to me worried about the books their children were reading, I would always tell them not to worry.  Any reading is good.  Now, of course there are a few caveats.  Of course I do not advocate for pornographic or evil or otherwise inappropriate texts for children and young adults.  But usually the complaint—at least when I was teaching—was about just how many Goosebumps books a child was reading, for example.  Yes, the books are formulaic.  Yes, read one and you've essentially read them all.  The same holds true for many child series.  But reading is a good thing, and eventually, the young reader will tire of the formula and crave something more sophisticated.  For me, it took somewhere around 90 Nancy Drew books before I wanted more.  Nine or 90 is okay.

Besides, R. L. Stine is a bit of a genius.  He has shown readers what makes for a good story:  1) a well-constructed plot; 2) convincing characterization; 3) a worthwhile theme; and 4) an appropriate style.  He also has shown readers that a successful formula will attract readers, keep them reading, and lead to a solid career as a writer.  In his case, that formula is to write chapters in such a way that ending one is near impossible and entices the reader to start the next chapter before closing the book.  All in all, R. L. Stine has made a positive contribution to literacy, even if the thought of reading one more Goosebumps books to your child makes you groan.

I will go on record stating that the single greatest act a parent can do for a child's educational success is to create and maintain a print rich environment in the home that promotes literacy experiences of all kinds by all who comprise the household.  Thus, the single greatest obstacle to educational success for many children in America is the lack of a print rich environment at home, where adults and children alike regularly engage in literacy acts.

I find it sad that the educational Powers-That-Be in America have never been willing to make a coordinated and substantial investment in providing print rich environments in all homes and supporting parents in their own literacy development.  Gazillions of dollars continue to be poured into the Head Start program, even though the government's own research has shown that gains Head Starts students make start to disappear around the the 3rd grade.

A friend of mine is moving to a town that has no public library.  It's 2015 and libraries are not a key element of our society.  Supporting literacy in the home and in the community is not a key element in our educational system.  It makes no bloody sense to me why not.  But, then again, no one ever asked me how to address the national literacy problem America faces.

Literacy matters.  Grammar matters.  Learning to communicate in myriad formats with clear and cohesive and correct words matters.  Comprehension matters.  Fluency matters.  Automaticity matters.  Listening skills matter.  Synthesis matters.  Analysis matters.  Critical thinking matters.  And the aspects of conversation matter.

I used to know more about those things.  I had this burning desire, as I saw the decline of literacy all around me—an the appalling literacy skills in the business world once I left education—to do something.  To write and teach and share in the hopes that I might at least help stem the tide in the ubiquitous egregious pronoun errors taking place in America.  To bring back the appreciation of the careful craftsmanship of the written word.  To help others value letters despite living in an instant communication world.

Now, my goal is simple: to shout at the world that LITERACY MATTERS—albeit somewhat feebly—by capturing the bits and pieces still left in my brain.

The cognitive dysfunction and decline I am facing has stayed my hand at picking up this task.  In my personal blog, I find grammatical errors all the time.  The me whom I used to be never made mistakes.  Now, I make them all the time and am deeply embarrassed by them.  If you spot one, please correct me. I will not like that you had to do so, but I will be truly grateful for the chance to have clean entries.  Because, in the end, this is not about me or my compositional pride.  It is about literacy.

Literacy matters.