Competency 8: Fluency: Role in Reading Development and Factors that Affect the Development of Fluency

RICA Reflection

Competency 8: Fluency: Role in Reading Development and Factors that Affect the Development of Fluency

Introduction

RICA Competency number eight addresses the fluency of a reader. It is important for the teacher to ensure that each student becomes more fluent everyday. Teachers must teach them to also comprehend what they are reading and in turn this will increase fluency.

Personal Connection/Evidence

There are a many ways that I have engaged with this competency.

Rate of speed in which a child reads at is important but a teacher must be able to stop and check for comprehension. I have a tutee that reads quickly because she has memorized that word before, but I have noticed if I have asked her a question about what she just read she is unable to tell me. I helped her work on her rate of reading. I had her slow down the rate of reading. As a result of here slowing down her rate of reading, she was able to comprehend the text better.I have tried to encourage her to slow do so she can hear herself read so that she will understand more. So far it is working. If she is unable to answer my question we will re-read the page in order to do so.

My tutees and I are working on prosody. It is important when I read to them to model good skills so that it will transfer over for them to do the same. I will be picking more books that have multiple characters in order to show that you can express prosody while reading. Plus, this makes the story come to life more. I modeled prosody weekly through read alouds. I make sure that I read with expression and pause when I see commas. By modeling prosody, I am setting my students up for success for when they read independently.

Although my tutees had not been on an airplane, I had connected to an experience that they have done to the book we were reading so that they would have background knowledge. The book Are we there? by Karen Herzoff is about a dad and two kids that go on an airplane to visit their grandparents. I asked them “if they had ever been on a long car trip somewhere to visit someone special,” and they said “yes.” For them to make the connection of going somewhere special and the anticipation of the arrival was important for them to connect to.

Text-to-Text Connections

“Prosody is a linguistic concept that refers to such features in oral language as intonation, pitch, stress, pauses, and the duration placed on specific syllables.” (RLTR p. 222)

“Helping students build background knowledge before reading remains an important task for teachers in classrooms with students with culturally diverse experiences.” (RLTR p. 69)

“Fluent readers first exhibit accurate reading, then reading with automaticity, and finally the use of prosody, which is likely to result of reading comprehension.” (RTLR, p. 222)

TPE Connections

TPE 2: Monitoring Student Learning During Instruction

TPE 3: Interpretation and Use of Assessments

TPE 4: Making Content Accessible

TPE 5: Student Engagement