Oral Reading Fluency

[Michele in NC]

Could someone please tell me how to do this?

Thanks,
Michele

[ElizabethB]

I read some of your other posts and saw that he had trouble with nonsense words.

Most of my remedial students do at first, but with a lot of practice, they get used to them, and this is very helpful for their reading fluency in the long run.

I would give him the MWIA as a diagnostic test: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/readinggradeleve.html

If he is reading the Phonetic words more than 15% slower than the Holistic words or misses more Phonetic words than Holistic words on the MWIA, my methods and recommendations should help.

For my remedial students, I find that over-learning the phonics basics is what ultimately leads to reading fluency. But, it takes time and practice, and it's better to learn to sound out things accurately and slowly at first, speed and fluency come with time and practice.

If his MWIA scores are like I described above, let me know here or PM me and I can give you more detailed instructions on how to help him, I've remediated a lot of students over my 15 years as a volunteer tutor. I have a class of 11 remedial students right now that volunteers from my church are helping me teach. It's a painful process at first to switch over from reading words by sight to sounding out words, but the long term benefits are great. And, it gets easier as you go along. I also have some fun games that help make the process a bit more enjoyable.

[Laurie4b]

You can google "Repeated oral readings" to get descriptions. It's very simple. Parent reads a passage aloud. Student reads silently. Student reads aloud. During this time, parent "gives" any words student doesn't know and on a separate photocopy of passage, marks mistakes and times the passage. Record the number of words correct for the baseline, choose a goal for the student (try for something they can make for sure at first), and repeat the procedure. About 4 times is a good number for the repeated readings. The students typically like seeing their graph improve. Between readings, you can go over any parts that were tricky for the student.

This method has a strong research-base of support. It's an important part of the reading program in addition to working with phonemic awareness, etc. Some programs, such as Wilson, have the fluency built into them. If your student is at a beginning level, sometimes the fluency reading can just be sentences or short stories that you write using words or word patterns that he has learned.

[LisaTheresa]

I use a book called Six Minute Solutions to do the repeated oral readings Laurie mentioned. My son at least doubled his reading rate the first year we used it.

Lisa