many reading levels, and fluency

This is good stuff, thanks again for sharing!! I have a 7th grade student whose instructional level is about 4th grade. I tried Read Naturally at 5.5 grade level and she was beyond frustrated so I bumped her back to 5th grade, I didn’t have anything lower than that in my office as the bulk of my practice is adolescents. She read very slowly, had a cold time of less than 50 words a minute with some misreads but with the repeated readings she got her speed and accuracy up to 118 words per minute. The child was delighted as we discussed the new vocabulary in the story.

Right now she hates reading because her decoding is so labored and slow in grade level material…I am hoping that this will help her with her fluency and appreciation of reading for enjoyment…

Students with so-so decoding skills tend to have reasonable comprehension in narrative text. The “skip and come back”strategy (or not come back) works very well on leisure reading/novels partly because students have sufficient background knowledge to be able to make sense of what they are reading.

It is rather different when they begin to seriously read content text- you really can’t skip the words in a Science book and expect to understand the passage in a sufficiently detailed way. And few students have enough background knowledge to provide enough context anyway- textbooks are supposed to introduce new information after all. At the middle to high school level level comprehehnsion should be assessed in both genres.

Patti — if you need some fourth-fifth grade materials that this student can deal with reasonably without having to stress and repeat many times, I can copy out-of-print things for the cost of copying and mailing (about seven cents a page for copying, and a couple of dollars for mailing). Just email me personally.

There should be no quarrel with the objective of producing fluent readers no matter what method and materials are used to teach a beginner. Most of us have heard of people who became fluent speakers of three or four languages following diligent effort. Fluency would seem to be a worthy accomplishment in reading as well.

One child might have learned how to sound out:

“Can Dan fan Jan?”
“Dan can fan Jan.”

Another child might have learned to map words from sight to meaning:

“Have they both been there?”
“Only one of the boys went there.”

Teachers hope to produce readers who can transform their slow, feeble, laborious, choppy early efforts into a smooth flow. We want readers to have instant recognition of most of the words they see in print. We want them to be able to scan phrases and short sentences effortlessly as they activate meaning.

Won’t both of the children we described above then be more fluent readers?

Peace.

This comment is totally irrelevant to the thought that I posted.

I had hoped that this one time Arthur and I might possibly agree on something, but he has chosen to go off on a tangent of his own invention.

I was suggesting (a) that fluency is not attained at a level where one is struggling with new material, and that one should be cautious about assigning “grade level” to students, as there is a *range* of grade levels; and (b) a practrical method to improve fluency, i.e. not to force new material and speed together, but to go reasonably slowly through new material and to work on fluency at a level that has already been mostly mastered for vocabulary and structure.

Arthur’s anti-phonics ideology came nowhere into that discussion.

Dear Victoria,

We agree on many things:

Reading Fluency occurs when there is ease and confidence in getting meaning from print. Beginning readers are usually hesitant.

Reading Grade Levels: They have not been standardized, and it is likely that no one can read everything. Rudolf Flesch (“Why Johnny Can’t Read”) said he taught his grandchildren to read, and “When a child can read, he can read anything. There is no such thing as reading levels.” I disagree with him. I agree with you that there are many reading levels—perhaps as many as there are readers.

Apparently test makers have not settled on uniform lists of words, definitions, and comprehension measures that can be associated with each school grade. If they had, a student would score at the same grade level on the WRAT, PIAT, SORT, and Woodcock-Johnson on the same day. He probably will not. On a number of such sampling tests, a child’s score increases by his saying just one more word. The tests provide a crude measure of reading ability, and we should be cautious about making judgments on what they reveal. We agree.

Instructional Speed: We agree. Set a reasonable pace. Provide much patient practice. Slow and steady wins the race. Fluency follows mastery.

Arthur’s “anti-phonics ideology”: Efficient readers read most words at sight. Most people can acquire enough incidental phonics to meet their reading needs in the absence of explicit instruction. They find this skill useful. Many excellent readers were not taught to read by “bottom-up” phonics.

But the LD child might not be able to learn phonics without explicit instruction. He should be taught this beneficial talent that he cannot learn on his own. He is certain to find great utility from phonetic ability that enables him to unlock the pronunciation of 85% of all the English words in print. He should also be told the truth about the non-phonetic common words he will see many times. Some high frequency words can be memorized easier than they can be sounded out.

Teachers who produce fluent readers are doing useful work. Teachers should teach reading in ways that works best for them and their students. It matters little to me that we might differ on the methods and materials we use. The bottom line: Prove that a person can meet his reading needs.

Peace.

Virtually all of the LD readers I teach have fluency problems. Some have severe fluency problems. One has intensively severe problems. These usually manifest in testing as rapid naming difficulties. I did once read a study that had “determined” that persons with this difficulty brains actually process and send impulses much slower than those who do not have this difficulty. Can’t recall much more about it.

I use materials well below instructional level to engage in fluency work. Last year I used Ken Campbell’s Great Leaps materials. One child improved from 30 wpm to 60+ wpm. His progress is slowing, but this is a huge improvement. Another child, in a half year, made no growth at all. She is the intensely severe child and is in the 20some wpm at her “independent” reading level. We feel like we have been there and done that with her. Needless to say, I do not feel successful with this young lady.

Most of my students with phonological processing deficits exhibit fluency difficulties, too, even after the phono. deficit is largely remediated. This is suggestive, in my opinion, of the multi-processing deficit I believe is present in most TRULY LD youngsters. Those with just phonological processing deficits can be remediated and/or taught successfully with good first instruction. Since my district is doing this now and has for the past few years, my resource program is attracting the LDs that are much more severe, plus the other handicaps that used to go to special day class, since our special day classes are all filling with children with Down Syndrome and LD parents shy away.

I, and most of the other teachers on this board, and the NIH, disagree with you very strongly in your *opinion* (totally disproved by the research — see NIH/NICHD) that

“Most people can acquire enough incidental phonics to meet their reading needs in the absence of explicit instruction. They find this skill useful. Many excellent readers were not taught to read by “bottom-up” phonics.”

In fact, I teach a number of subjects to people of all ages at a number of educational levels, the vast majority *not* LD, and it is a continual and pervasive problem that **many if not most of my students, ordinary people, can not read**. Oh, they can do well enough on finding street signs or locating corn flakes in the store, the most primitive level of literacy, and they can generally do multiple-guess tests if they are coached very thoroughly first — but give them a piece of text on an unfamiliar topic, and the hash they make of it is truly amazing. I am speaking of everything from Calculus 3 students who cannot read a definition in their calculus textbook, down to Driver’s Ed students who cannot read the directions on how to control a skid in their Driver’s Ed book, and over to people trying out for the theater who can’t read the parts they want to play (including the modern ones, *not* only Shakespeare). They make all the standard phonics-disability miscues — leave out the little words so that the connections of the sentences are lost, leave off all endings, replace unfamiliar words with vaguely similar familiar ones so that the meanings are lost, change/drop verb tenses and lose or reverse time relations and causality, lose the difference between positive and negative statements, read backwards and in circles and reverse cause and effect, guess wildly from pictures, and skip over all the “hard” stuff so that they lose all sense of what was the main message. They also hesitate and grunt and drag. If the present reading teaching system is so great, and I am in a nice middle-class suburban area, why am I surrounded by illiterates?

In teaching junior college, I became aware of the literacy/numeracy tests taken by the entering students. The colleges no longer dare to take a high school diploma of proof of even the most basic skills. I don’t have the data in front of me, but something like 50% of entering college students score below high school level in reading, i.e .at least four years behind, and about 80% in math. If your “incidental phonics” works so well, why are over half of our high school graduates functionally illiterate?

It has become a truism in teaching high school, and now junior college, that you don’t even try to get the students to read their textbooks — they can’t. There are a few exceptions in honors classes, but the majority of classes are taught — and required to be taught — as oral coaching to very specific multiple-guess testing. Those of us who have been there are not surprised (disgusted, but not surprised) by the low levels shown on national testing.

By the way, I was watching a show on something else, the problems of side effects of medication I believe, and the statement was made on the side re reading labels that “The average American adult reads below the ninth-grade level.” Since the high school graduation rate overall is over 80%, this says something about lost time. Again, this agrees with my personal experience and with the results of college entry tests.

“Incidental Phonics” has been the standard method of teaching in the great majority of American schools for fifty years. It has been proved over and over again to be *extremely* inefficient for almost all students, and a disaster for a large number. My college students — *not* LD —have had to try to re-learn to read as adults after having wasted twelve years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax money on a school system that has been *proved* a failure. And those are the ones that actually got to college — the rest never learn.

Arthur needs to give it up, read the NIH/NIHCD report, and face some facts.

(BTW, of his lists that he thinks are “non-phonic” words, most are simply an irregular vowel or a silent letter, and can be dealt with quite easily in a phonic-based reading program; he likes to trot out his cute lists to try to discredit people, but this just shows the weakness of his argument)

Dear Victoria,

Phonics is a mighty tool; it is not almighty. There is not one letter in the English alphabet that can be associated with a single reliable sound in every word in which it appears.

Does a student have to wait until he has mastered phonics before being exposed to words like: the, of, one?

Teach phonics. Teach it first if you wish. Teach it well.

I want to learn how a phonics teacher goes about teaching the word “the.”

Peace.

Thank you, both, for your thoughful insights to reading issues which you take time to post on this site. I appreciate both of your professional opinions. I, a mother of a child who struggles with reading, have learned so much and look forward to learning more.

Thanks again!

Dear Donna in MO,

It is so nice to be appreciated even if only for only good intentions. I am confident Victoria joins me in thanking you for your kind words. As Thumper of Bambi fame said, ” My mother says, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’”

If you have specific questions or a need for materials I can supply at my cost, please do not hesitate to contact me.

[email protected]

Peace.

How to teach “the”

Very simply:

*th* is the sound at the beginning of this, that, them, these, those, … a regular digraph.

*e* makes the “muttered” or “schwa” sound (sort of “uh” but not stressed) in most unstressed situations, as in candle and most other le endings, her and most other er words, the second e in elephant, etcetera; I teach this sound as the third sound of the letter e because it’s so common (other vowels also fall to this sound when unstressed, but it is particularly common for e).

The word “the” is thus a perfectly simple word to read.

I strongly avoid the pronunciation “thee” which is used in a few speech situations of special stress, but sounds artificial in most sentences (Similarly, I try to train my tutoring students away form the habit of saying “I see ay dog”, but with little success as the local system, which teaches almost no phonics, for some reason teaches this artificial style.)

OK, fo hard words like “one” and “once”, I tell them this is an oddball and just accept that it breaks the rules, but those odd ones are quite rare.

Dear Victoria,

Thanks.

I have considered the possibility of teaching “the” with sounds, but I find it simpler to have students memorize it as an oddball word. “The” is the only English word I know of in which “e” is associated with the sound “uh.” Am I not, therefore, really teaching “the” as a unique sight word?

“Th” can be associated with several sounds in words (and sometimes with no sound at all). there, three, thy, thyme, clothes

Some graduate student has undoubtedly found many sounds for “e” —long and short, ay, uh, and no sound at all.

My students often say ay instead of uh for the letter A. They are correct when they read A in an outline. Uh seems much closer to normal speech when reading text aloud. I think students say ay because they learned it as a letter name and as a long vowel. I wish teachers would insist on uh for A in oral reading right from the beginning.

Students often substitute A for The. I think it is because the words rhyme. I wish teachers would correct them. Whole language teachers often let substitutions slip by (pony for horse). This is mush in my opinion. Encouraging a lack of precision in reading fosters bad habits that can result in a loss of meaning.

Pam wants the one I have. Pam wants a one I have.

Peace.