When to stop pushing for accuracy and go for speed/efficienc

I have the following “skill objective” categories:
1. Word recognition/decoding
2. Fluency—rate and accuracy
3. Comprehension
Includes inferencing, vocabulary, prediction, etc.

I have students who need it all and some who only need one or two pieces. I work on more than one objective at a time because comprehension is the final objective. I do not give decoding instruction to all students.

Fewer students, in my opinion, need *only* comprehension work—the proverbial “word-caller” and research seems to support this conclusion. Many more students have word recognition and fluency problems that hang-up their comprehension. It is, though, important to know the difference between a “word caller” and one with decoding issues.

I start my decoding students on a fluency intervention—such as repeated readings—in Wilson Book 4 and Spire 5 if they are “slow” decoders and want to “sound out” past the time they really know a pattern that has been taught. I continue decoding instruction and add the fluency piece. I’m always checking for the word and passage comprehension.

Hope this help

At 11 years old, the reading is going to continue to get more challenging, unless of course you’re willing to settle for pretty watered-down content. You may not gain much more in percentiles but these bright kiddos need to keep learning and practicing or they mistake narcissus for narcissist and it *does* impact the meaning.
This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be working on both, and spend less time on the accuracy so that some time can be spent on the speed and fluency.
I taught for five years at a middle & high school for LD kids, and everybody had intensive tutoring as part of their school day. I also taught in public schools and saw the kids who weren’t getting outside help. It’s so tempting to try to let their ferocious intelligence work for them and make up for the gaps — but having seen both options, I’d keep plugging away.

Thanks for your comments; he will not receive any help during the school day; his scores do not qualify him for special ed., nor would he agree to it.

He has done Wilson, and decodes complex words very well and has a huge sight word vocabulary; it’s the little words a/the, what/that, etc.that he has trouble with. I think he does not sacrifice meaning, his comprehension on the GORT was above grade level, but he reads so slowly that it takes him a long time to get through assignments. Thanks for your thoughts.

Out of curiosity, were his word attack and word recognition scores significantly lower before Wilson?

If you son were my student, I would begin a fluency intervention program right away. I’m sure his teacher models fluency and does some choral reading with him, but I would do a repeated reading program (like Great Leaps) as a daily intervention. I’ve had wonderful success in raising reading rate and accuracy using repeated readings.

Be sure to concentrate on study skills, such as SQ3R (or SQ4R) to content area reading for information.

Another good idea for building fluency is reading along with book-on-tape at home. Listen to high-level novels (Moby Dick, Great Expections, etc.) of interest. Can be a fun whole-family activity with each person having their own copy of the novel.

Yes, he was a non-reader in 2nd grade who fooled everyone because , I think, he was so bright. His 2nd grade scores before Wilson were: WJ-R broad reading 6pr, LW ident 14pr, passage comp 5pr, word attack 18pr (WISC III V108, P 119, FS 114); his 5th grade scores were: WJ III reading fluency 21pr, LW ident 56pr, passage comp 66pr, word attack 32pr (WISC III V125, P 113, FS 122, Verbal Comp. index 131). Overall, academically he’s low-average on testing but the evaluators in school told us he’s very bright so doesn’t qualify for special ed. services. Thank so much for your suggestions; we have tried Grat Leaps, but he got bored by the materials, maybe I should just reward him for sticking with it for the summer. Yes, we do lots of buddy reading Harry Potter, the Louis Sachar books, the CS Lewis series, and now the Lemony Snicket books, plus all the required reading for school we did as buddy reading…I felt like I’d completed 5th grade again! We had the school say they didn’t want him to be dependent on books on tape, but I think he’ll need it next year in 6th grade.

My son has some problems with the small words. The optomotrist diagnosed him with a pursuit eye movement deficiency. Also diagnosed with saccadic deficiencies that cause him to lose his place.

I did not tell her that he confuses the small words (calls the and etc) she asked me and said it is related to the pursuit eye movement deficiency. She also asked if he loses his place, I said yes.

She gave us 2 choices eye glasses (even though his vision is 20/20) or vision therapy.

We went with the glass which should be ready this week. I will let you know if they make a difference.

My friends son saw huge gains with the glasses. He is in 1st grade and reads at a 6th grade level.

My son is only in second grade but reads very well despite these deficits. He seems to have very good comprehension. He does seem to tire easily when reading which I hope will be helped by the glasses.

This is a pattern I see a lot. The student has learned to sound out phonetically and really reads the long words. He has also been taught sight memoriozation and tries to get the short words by memorize and guess. Well, he is not an effective sight memorizer — and really, very very few students are, which is why this is such a common pattern. Also so many of these little words are so visually similar, an and and, they and then and them and the, etc. And then he has two competing ansd self-contradictory sets of rules going in his mind: “When you see a long word, move left to right across if and sound it out by these syllable and phonetic rules; but when you see a short word, brush your eyes across it quickly, try to pick up the whole word by sight and guess its meaning and go back and forth around the whole sentence to try to make a meaning from context.” Anybody trying to play a game by two sets of rules at the same time is going to trip over his own feet. No wonder he is slow — not only does he have to sound out new words, not only does he have to do a slow and inefficient memory-bank search over three or four hundred words to try to spot each short word, but he has to constantly decide which set of rules apply where. And then when he guesses wrong and the sentence is incomprehensible, then he loses track and gets even slower.

I have had some success in clearing this up by going back and re-teaching (or actually *teaching* for the first time, as opposed to guesswork) those common short words. Analyze them phonetically. Once you know the rules, especially the th and wh digraphs, the words and, then, this, that, when, and 90% of those so-called “sight” words are quite phonetically regular and make good sense. Most others are difficult only in one less-common vowel sound as are they, come, some, etc. The worst are one and once, but even they have consonant clues.
Then , read orally anything that has to be read, but *each and every time* he misses one of those little connecting words, stop him and have him go back and say the sound or sounds he missed. At first he will find this difficult because he has been used to only reading the long words and treating the short ones as garbage (this is the problem,. right?), but after a few sessions most kids see a light flash and start to make much more sense out of their reading. For a few hours or weeks you will have to slow down, but once he has caught on to the fact that all words play by the same rules he will be able to speed up a lot.
My personal experience has been that speed training with a student who is dragging this kind of guesswork and inaccuracy is ineffective and frustrating and often counterproductive. Aftet the student is actually reading as opposed to wandering around in a swamp guessing and getting stressed, then speed picks up fairly easily with practice and day-to-day work.

I have not seen students become dependent on books-on-tape unless they have no SSR time. Most students are motivated to read independently.

They are a great fluency technique because the readers are wonderful models and following along helps build that ability to visually track quickly. If they tire/lose their place, stop tape and restart when place is found or reader is rested.

I think you are doing a wonderful job in helping your child Read & Succeed!

Susan Long

Victoria,

You are a whiz. Thanks so much. I will try this. Missing the small words hadn’t worried me too much because he seems to have good comprehension even though he misses them. I can see how this could become a problem later as the work gets more difficult. Better to tackle those bad habits early, right.

I have been using your advice about the math facts from the math board. My son is doing great with his times tables this summer.

Linda

I have many students that I test at the beginning of remediation that don’t know that most of the three and four letter words have the short vowel sound in them. Phono-Graphix does this very well. I feel that this happens because the letter names are stressed so much when the students are young and when they see an ‘a’ they say the /a-e/ sound not the short sound of a. I would recommend that you purchase the book, Reading Reflex and work on chapters three and four with him and he will be fine. If you need some help, you can email me directly. Shay