Instructional Coach Weekly Update
Weeks of Mar. 21-25
Strategy Spotlight
Phrase Cued Reading for Fluency Practice -
Fluency is more than just a student's ability to read fast and from my observations "Fluency Flagging" is the most common way I see teachers teaching "fluency" on a day to day basis. One strategy the incorporates direct instruction with fluency is Phrase Cued Reading.
Fluency is the ability to read text with automaticity, accuracy, and good prosody. Having prosody involves being able to chunk words into appropriate phrases of meaningful units based on the syntactic features of the text (Kuhn & Stahl, 2000). As with fluency itself, having prosody aids students with achieving greater comprehension of text, the ultimate goal of reading.
The strategy of phrase-cued reading, also known as phrased text, assists developing and struggling students with both their fluency and comprehension by focusing on one of the key areas of prosody known as juncture, or appropriate text phrasing (Kuhn & Stahl, 2000). Studies have shown that using phrased-cued texts can facilitate reading performance as it helps focus students on the phrasing and chunking of texts (Rasinski, (1994). In turn, students who have better phrasing while they read often increase their comprehension of the given text.
Phrase-cued text obviously enhances fluency, but how does it impact comprehension? One of the characteristics of a disfluent reader is that he/she reads word-by-word, focusing much on decoding (Rasinski, 2003). Decoding can become so difficult that the reader cannot easily process and understand the text. By using phrasal units, the phrase carries the meaning within the discourse. Comprehension increases as the student is able to process the chunked text.
Here is a link to a Phrase Cued Script for teachers from our CPU Reading Strategies Site.
Below are Videos of Barbara Leete modeling this strategy in her building:
Video 1 - This is the very first day of modeling and having the students then do it with me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FqqyLi8u3A
Video 2 - This the second day. We moved into the "you do" phase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cOYk6UXcZs
Video 2 - This is still the second day of instruction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5O4k6W_U94
If you have questions, would like for me to model, or cover your classroom to watch another teacher, please let me know. There is a little preparation for the materials and I will gladly get those ready for you if you are interested in doing this procedure.
Past Week
- Writing lessons in 4th grade
- Math lessons in 4th grade
- Math lessons in 5th grade
- Data team meeting
- Team planning meetings
- Reading assessments in 5th grade
- Check in's with teachers
- Planning and preparing resources and materials for teachers
- NTC Tools
The Week Ahead
- Teaching/Co-teaching daily math lessons in 5th grade
- Teaching/Co-teaching daily small group lessons in 3rd grade
- Social Thinking meetings
- Team planning meetings
- Helping with reading assessments in 5th grade
- NTC tool updates
- Updates to interventions on the system and google docs
Follow up on Effect Size
There are some influences on this list with very high effect sizes that I don't know much about. I plan on doing some research into several of those and I will share about them in future SMORES.