In
this charming article in The Reading
Teacher, Illinois elementary teachers Barclay Marcell and Christine Ferraro
describe a second-grade girl who “reads 100 words per minute with a flat voice
and a mind that’s focused on what’s for lunch,” a boy who reads 120 words a
minute and cares more about his reading-rate graph than the content of the
story, and students who ask, “Are you timing me?” and “Did I beat my last
score?” Most upsetting of all are students who can’t provide an accurate
retelling of what they read.
Marcell and Ferraro recall how
fluency became an obsession in elementary classrooms after the National Reading
Panel’s 2000 report and RTI’s focus on measurable data. Somehow the emphasis on
reading fast and saying words accurately eclipsed expression and comprehension.
Why? “It seems that, amid the well-intentioned use of timers, graphs, and
programs devoted to repeated readings, fluency practice was being distilled to
‘race reading,’” they say. Authentic fluency should be “reading with and for
meaning,” but it was lost in many classrooms. “Although we believe that automaticity
is indeed a hallmark of reading fluency,” they say, “we needed our students to
grasp fluency’s multifaceted features and related strategies – to adjust pace,
to add expression, to connect and summarize. We also wanted to make fluency
instruction more engaging for kids.”
To accomplish this, Marcell
and Ferraro created a series of evil characters that personified bad reading
habits, made character cards of each one, and pasted them to the back of
popsicle sticks:
-
Robot
Reader, who wants you to read like an automaton and keeps you from
understanding;
-
Choppy
Boy, who wants you to chop words;
-
Alien
Dude, who wants you to read like a Martian without understanding the words
(“Hmmm, what did I just read?”)
-
Flat
Man, who makes sure your voice doesn’t go up or down.
Who would deal with these characters? “It’s
time for Poetry Power Man and his superhero friends – Super Scooper, Expression
Man, and Captain Comprehension – to enter our reading blocks,” say Marcell and
Ferraro. “Their mission? To fight for fluency and all its facets – rate, expression, accuracy, and learning…”
Why poetry? Because reading
poems enlists all the skills students need to read fluently – rate, expression,
accuracy, and learning – as well as phrasing, metaphors, similes,
personifications, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and, of course,
comprehension. Marcell and Ferraro created a fluency development sequence that stretched
through each week and had these components:
-
Introducing
a short passage (usually a poem)
-
Reading
it aloud
-
Discussing
the content
-
Choral
reading
-
Paired
reading
-
Word
study
-
Home
practice
-
Performance
-
Final
re-reading
During each week, students did Practice #1
with Super Scooper fighting Choppy Boy for good phrasing, Practice #2 with
Expression Man fighting Flat Man for lively voice inflection (as measured by
the Expression-O-Meter), and Practice #3 with Captain Comprehension fighting
Alien Dude for summarizing and connecting to deeper understanding. The final
day included performances.
The
results? Over four years of implementation, all dimensions of students’ fluency
have improved markedly, as has their enjoyment of poetry and reading.
