Fluency and Comprehension

I see fluency and comprehension as being very closely linked. Fluency aids comprehension because the more fluent a student is as a reader the easier it will be for him/her to comprehend what is read. If students can read accurately, quickly, and with the proper sentence expression very well, they spend less mental energy trying to decode words and can use that energy to work on understanding the text as a whole. Comprehension also aids in improving fluency because as students develop comprehension strategies and practice them through reading they develop schemas about different ideas and build their vocabulary with more words they can read automatically. In turn, they continue to become more fluent, which gives them the tools to begin comprehending even more difficult text, and the cycle continues on and on. My placement is in 3rd grade and my CT always points out that 3rd grade is the year when the focus in reading falls more heavily on comprehension and less on fluency. Students are expected to be fluent enough readers by the beginning of 3rd grade that they can easily make this shift. Unfortunately, for students who are not fluent readers, if intervention and individual attention are not given these students are at risk for falling even farther behind.

Fluency is not directly taught in my class, except occasionally as a center activity (timed reading, etc.). My class does spend considerable time teaching vocabulary and text structure through spelling tests and homework, focus vocabulary in guided reading, sentence structure (noun, verb, adjective, subject, predicate, etc.), and paragraph structure (main idea, supporting details, etc.). These topics are taught in a variety of ways - mini lessons, guided reading, worksheets, spelling tests, and writer's workshop. Students are working on building familiarity of a greater number of words and are beginning to dig deeper into the components of words, sentences, and text overall. So far I have not seen any assessments on fluency specifically. We are supposed to do DRA testing this fall but we have not gotten around to it yet. Worksheets and writing samples are used as informal ways to assess some of students vocabulary and text structure knowledge. Comprehension instruction is taught mostly through guided reading of stories in a basal reader. The reading book outlines a specific comprehension strategy to focus on for that story. My CT will model the use of that strategy and will conduct full class discussions where the students get to talk about and try that strategy themselves. After finishing each story, the class usually completes a worksheet with questions about the story requiring a variety of comprehension skills (pulling information directly from the text, summarizing, predicting, inferring, etc.)

Due to the generally full-class structure of lessons in my class, it's often difficult to learn about individual students as readers, especially the quieter students. For my guided lead teaching I'm planning to create activities that make the students more individually accountable for their reading and understanding of the stories. Although reading of texts will be guided and I will help students with unfamiliar words I plan to give students the opportunity to apply certain strategies on their own using a story map or other graphic organizer before we discuss them as a class. I will be able to look at these papers later to gain some idea of what students are able to do on their own related to comprehension. I also plan to take anecdotal notes of students fluency when they read aloud in class.