My 11yo son is in 5th grade and has improved greatly with private tutoring, but on the GORT 3 his rate is at the 16th %, word accuracy at 75th%, and comprehension at 63rd%; he reads orally in short, fluent phrases, but slowly! This is a problem in keeping up with a fast-paced school program and we are planning on books on tape for middle-school literature next year(otherwise he’ll never keep up)…anything else we could do to increase his rate? He has superior intelligence(but processing speed on the WISC III was 66th%), and is a very hard worker(receives no school accomodations). Any advice about books on tape?
Re: Advice on increasing reading rate
www.recordedbooksontape.com has a wonderful service. You can rent tapes from them very conveniently and they send it in a box that you flip over and send it back in.
To build better speed at reading, I think students need to read. They recommend 20-30 minutes reading a day in a book that’s right at the student’s reading level or even a little below. They should not have to struggle with unknown words if they’re reading the book to build speed.
Re: Advice on increasing reading rate
There is a simple strategy to substantively improve his rate. Please call me toll-free at 877-475-3277. Your son is not a candidate for my program and I have nothing to sale. It would take a half hour to post what I know, ten minutes or less to tell you. Ken Campbell, author, Great Leaps Reading
Cognitive training
is what helped my daughter’s reading rate dramatically. (We also did vision therapy and Phono-Graphix, but of which helped in other ways.) We did PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com) after vision therapy, in order to develop visual processing skills.
Just prior to PACE (but after vision therapy) my daughter tested 1.8 standard deviations below the norm in rate, accuracy and passage on the GORT-3 (within normal limits on comprehension). Her reading at that time was extremely choppy and unnatural — no phrasing, no stopping for punctuation — and excruciatingly slow. By the end of the 5th week of PACE, we could see some improvement in reading fluency and speed. By the end of the 12th week, her reading speed and fluency was completely normal — perhaps even above average — and has remained so (this was two years ago).
PACE is expensive, but worth it if you can do it. A solid, home-based alternative is Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com).
Mary
Re: Advice on increasing reading rate
Thanks for all the suggestions; I will probably go back to reading with him after school, we did this in 2-4th grades and it (along with other things) really helped. In 2nd gr. he was a nonreader, and now, except for the speed, he can keep up. It matters for school when he has to read a certain amount of pages or chapters per night; I do read to him from the texts and that works, but there is a LOT of written material to cover.
As in everything else, you get better with practice. There is a vicious circle: if you read slowly and with difficulty, you don’t read much, so you are less likely to read and you get less practice and fall further behind.
Books on tape may be a stopgap necessary to keep up with literature in middle school, but the best thing to do, difficult as it may be at first, is to sit down with you or the tutor and continue reading out loud regularly. Half an hour a day, or three one-hour sessions a week, would be a good amount to make a definite change. And if he reads the schoolbooks steadily for this time (whether or not that particular page has been assigned yet) it is amazing how much he can cover — may end up not needing the tapes after all.