Word Recognition
What is word recognition?
Word recognition is the ability to read words. Word recognition must be taught. Students must be able to:
· look at letters or letter combinations of the word
· identify the sounds that correspond to those letters or letter combinations
· blend the sounds together to pronounce the word
*Students must have the vocabulary background to make sense of the word in context.
Why focus on word recognition?
Vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and overall academic success rely on word recognition!! Teachers/parents must provide interventions such as building skills in sounding out regular words, teaching irregular words, and providing students with opportunities to apply their decoding skills by reading accessible text, to students who struggle with word recognition as a way of fostering this skill.
Fluency
What is fluency?
Fluency is the ability to read text accurately, quickly, and with smoothness and expression. (RI PreK-12 Literacy Policy, 2005)
The three dimensions:
· Accuracy: Readers must be able to sound out or recognize words in a text with minimal errors.
· Automaticity: Readers need to be automatic, rapid and effortless at recognizing words (may be expressionless).
· Prosody: Phrasing (knowing where to pause)
Intonation (deciding which words to stress)
Expression (text (meaning) clues)
Why focus on fluency?
Recent research on fluency shows that there is a strong correlation between reading fluency and reading comprehension.
Why stress the importance of fluency?
When the reader focuses all of his/her attention on word recognition, it drains cognitive resources and leaves little room for comprehension.
Activities teachers/parents can to do to foster fluency
Pair- Share: Partner 1- Read the first paragraph out loud to your partner
Partner 2- Read the second paragraph out loud
Continue to alternate roles until you reach the end of the text
Pair- Share Discussion Points
Did you each read your paragraph fluently?
Why or why not?
Identify the factors that may have inhibited fluent reading of the paragraphs.
Read Aloud: Reading aloud to students in your classroom
Serve many purposes:
Models reading fluency
Provides background knowledge to students
Navigates text structures
Repeated Reading: Consists of rereading a short, meaningful passage several times
Repeated Reading allows students to practice reading independently.
Instructional techniques include: Repeated Reading through direct instruction, Radio Reading, Say it like the Character, Cooperative Repeated Reading, etc.
Readers Theater
Students develop scripts, perform in groups, and practice using their voice to depict characters from texts. Through this activity, students have the opportunity to develop fluency and further enhance comprehension of what they are reading.
** Round Robin Reading where students take turns reading parts of a text is no longer recommended. It has been proven to show little or no relationship to gains in reading achievement as students receive little actual practice in reading because no child is allowed to read for very long.
The above activities will foster student’s fluency which is imperative as more fluent readers focus their attention on making connections among the ideas in a text and between these ideas and their background knowledge. Therefore, they are able to focus on comprehension
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