LEAven Blog

I have been an educator for over 25 years, and I spent over half of my time in the classroom as a reading specialist.  I have seen the pendulum swing from whole language to balanced literacy to explicit instruction in the five areas of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension).  Based on my experience, I believe students learn best through explicit modeling of instruction in all areas. For students in the middle grades, the explicit instruction of fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary has resulted in positive literacy experiences for students.

Fluency
Fluency is the ability for students to read text with accuracy, prosody, and appropriate rate.  Fluency must be explicitly taught. How? Through reading aloud text.  Teachers must model fluency through the read-aloud. Students then need to practice reading out loud. What I have found to be successful is paired reading. Paired reading allows students to take turns reading aloud to each other.  Each student may have a copy of the text, and while one student reads a paragraph, the other student is actively reading and listening. The pairs switch off reading aloud paragraph by paragraph. I have done this with ELA, social studies, and science texts. Another successful fluency activity involves role-playing. Students read reader’s theatre scripts in a small group.  Repetition while reading individual parts supports successful fluency practice. Reader’s theatre allows for natural practice of prosody as students take on the role of a character.

Comprehension
Comprehension instruction is key to strong literacy development. A suggested text that I have utilized over the years is Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor.  McGregor’s text focuses on strategic reading through the explicit instruction of various comprehension strategies.  These strategies include metacognition, schema development, inferring, questioning, determining importance, visualizing, and synthesizing. The use of concrete objects, anchor charts, and picture books to teach each comprehension strategy is explained within the book. This is effective and engaging for middle-grade students’ literacy development.

Vocabulary
Students need explicit vocabulary instruction to fully comprehend content-area texts. The Marzano method is one way for students to dive into specific tiered vocabulary words. The teacher introduces a word, accompanied by visuals or a word map, to explain its meaning.  Then students restate the definition in their own words.  Students then create a nonlinguistic representation of the word.  These activities are completed in a vocabulary notebook, where students create sentences or a visual thesaurus of the word.  Students then practice their understanding of the words through vocabulary games.  One game that students can play in class or at home involves rolling dice.  Depending on what the student rolls, the action may be to act out the word or to create sentences using the vocabulary word.

For students to improve literacy skills at the middle level, specific instruction in the areas of fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary is extremely helpful. Working with struggling readers, I saw great success when my students practiced these skills.  Remembering that students still need explicit instruction in these reading areas is key to successful literacy development in the classroom.