Reading Fluency ~ for moderate to severe dyslexia

This is exactly what worked with my son, but it took hundreds of hours over 4 years!

SAR,
You’re right, there’s no magic bullet, but the idea of speed drills for kids with low RAN makes sense. I’m wondering if Dr. Fischer’s speed drills are the basis for RAVE-O’s computer Speed Wizards game (I believe that’s the name of the game — which is not available yet!

By the way, did your son do vision therapy? If so, was it helpful?

No, he did not.

SAR,
Do you continue to do this to help your son be automatic on new vocabulary or does he acquire new vocabulary now without overlearning?

Beth

We keep up oral reading for fluency, but he never had problems with vocabulary (except for spelling new words), or comprehension…which were on a par with his superior cognitive scores. But he needs to get faster at reading to keep up in school, it’s a constant battle, like dieting I think!

Sounds pretty much like what I’ve been doing and recommending for years! It works.

A couple of notes: there is a regular push for speed, speed in reading. Please note that these experts with PhD’s thought that a reading speed of one word per second, or 60 wpm, would be quite adequate for a student over age 7. True, this is slow. But that is reading with near-perfect accuracy and good comprehension.
Far better to read a little slowly and get something out of it than to rush through a book quickly — I don’t say read, because this is not reading — and remember nothing. There was a discussion earlier where one teacher mentioned his students who “read” their textbooks and have no idea what they just looked at, and then went back a second time slowly to answer the questions on the homework and then understood the passage and remembered. If they had skipped the first so-called “reading”, ie flipping pages at speed but not gaining information, and had gone straight to the slow reading with attention, their total time would have gone down and their effective speed gone up.
I am constantly making students slow down and do things right; the amazing thing (to them) is that after they do things right, suddenly they find they are going faster.

I don’t like the constant stress on stopwatches and all. This makes students nervous and keeps their minds on the clock and away from the job at hand. I find that it is quite easy, having a student read orally, to hear when he is reading at least one word in 1.5 seconds (the researchers’ minimal level for teaching) and when he is not. If he cannot handle the passage given, then it is time to move down to a level he can handle, just as this article recommends.

It’s also worth noting that while they do practice repeated reading of drills, they test the student on unfamiliar material using the same skills. This is very important to make sure you are testing reading and not memorization.

I prefer to use materials that repeat the same vocabulary/skills many times in a variety of different sentences to avoid the memorization trap.

Also the combination of drills and passage reading does work.

My work has involved timing, but not stopwatches. There are timers now which don’t even buzz, flashing when the minute is up so data can be kept accurately and decisions made. With tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of timed interventions now under our belts, I can safely say the stress of timings is more tutor-induced (or feared) than anything else.

We have not timed to create speed demons. We timed to accurately score progress - to enable us to share research, develop coherent interventions, etc.

Obviously, advanced comprehension work comes when beginning fluency has been achieved.

Ken

And they tend to hang out at IDA conferences …

One of the reasons I mentioned this is I talked with one of Dr. Wolf’s research assistants, and although RAVE-O isn’t available yet, she mentioned that I could use some of the programs RAVE-O is comprised of.

I believe Dr. Wolf’s research with RAVE-O references Dr. Fisher’s Speed Drills (although I’m not certain of this because I don’t have her paper in front of me at the moment). It makes sense that she may have used this concept since Speed Wizards is described as a computer speed drill game.

I believe the Speed Drills created by Dr. Fisher do not involve timed reading of text, but building speed in the recognition of orthographic patterns, particularly those with multiple sounds.