1.Who is Luke? Provide a brief description of the child. Do you have kids like Luke in your own class?
Luke is a seventh grade student who struggled with reading and writing. Luke’s reading fluency and rate were at the level of a second grader. He is also on medication for seizures and ADHD. Luke’s teachers describe him as well mannered and cooperative however his academic performance is inconsistent and is possibly related to his attention problems.
This year I am working with several students concerning reading rate and fluency.
2.Describe briefly the intervention used to addressed Luke’s problems in reading. Have you used similar instructional tools with your poor readers?
A variety of interventions were used to help Luke with his reading problems. Luke’s classroom interventions involved using the Wilson Reading System. This program was used during his fifth and sixth grade years. Luke’s decoding skills had shown improvement by the end of sixth grade but he continued to struggle with reading rate and fluency. It was at this point Luke’s parents approached ASU’s Reading Clinic for help. Luke continued with the upper levels of the Wilson program at school and began to attend the clinic two days a week. The intervention used in the clinic was a lot of supported contextual reading. Luke was given recordings of a chapter of his reading. He would listen to the recording of a page, stop the recording and reread the page to himself. After the entire chapter was read he would focus on the first few pages of the chapter in preparation for a timed reading on this section. The tutor also used guided reading at Luke’s instructional level as well as repeated readings. The repeated readings were passages previously read in guided reading; Luke would read for two minutes. The number of words he read was then recorded on a chart and Luke would then read the passage a second time with these results also being recorded on the chart. During the next session Luke would reread this section two more times and these were recorded on the same chart. The last part of the tutoring session included a read aloud by the tutor.
I am using guided reading, rereading of text and timed repeated readings. The visual from the timed repeated reading chart gives students motivation.
3. The main finding of this study is that the child improved his reading rate by 25 words per minute over the course of the intervention. This same gain eluded Luke’s isolated word reading rate (as measured with Word Recognition in Isolation–WRI). How do the authors explain this discrepancy? See their discussion on phrasing in the Commentary section.
Luke struggled with phrasing as he read. He has trouble like many readers, putting words into chunks. The authors explain by stating written text does not have graphic clues imbedded in it to guide the reader concerning phrase boundaries. These types of cues are present when we speak but are lacking in print. This is a challenge for the struggling and beginning readers. They must learn to use subtle phrase structure clues.
4. Do you see any connections to our previous readings (e.g., Adams, 2004; Ehri & Wilce, 1979; Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975, etc)?
There is a connection to Ehri & Wilce study which confirmed the importance of a grapho-phoneme connection. This connection develops automaticity in the beginning reader. This automaticity increases fluency and reading rate.
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