Teach-Primary-Issue-20.1

Building fluency In classrooms where FASE Reading is used effectively, reading is done joyfully with expression and care. At times, the teacher will model fluent and expressive reading – what we refer to as bridging – then ask students to do the same. Bridging involves teachers reading a short segment of text in between student readers. In a typical sequence of bridging, a teacher might have Arjun read for three sentences and then read one sentence herself. Then she might have Maria read four sentences and read two sentences herself before asking Nikki to read for six sentences before passing off to Joaquin, and so on. The benefit of this method is that it moves the story along quickly and keeps the narrative thread alive, while supporting and maximising fluency and comprehension with interspersed models of teacher-quality expressive reading. Because students don’t know who will be called on to read, they all follow along attentively in the text – increasing the amount of quality road miles they get on the page. You can see these ideas in action in US teacher Christine Torres’s fifth W hen discussing reading pedagogy, we are often struck by the number of veteran teachers who have come to believe that writing about and discussing texts are more valuable classroom activities than actually reading (and enjoying) those texts. However, as Christopher Such explains, “This [children writing after reading] is a good way for the teacher to assess whether something has been understood, but it is the reading itself and the related discussion that best advances children’s ability to read.” He goes on to advise, “If in doubt, aim for roughly two-thirds of the lesson to comprise reading and one-third of the lesson to comprise discussion.” FASE Reading can help structure this approach. ‘FASE’ stands for the type of reading the system is designed to reinforce: fluent, attentive, social, and expressive. It’s a consistent approach to having students read aloud so that they follow along and are always ready to read themselves, and it’s a critical tool to reinforce correct orthographic mapping and reveal and correct incorrect mapping. grade (Y6) class in Christine Torres: Discovered ( tinyurl. com/tp-CTorresFASE ). Consistency is key Just as reading aloud expressively is good for students, so too is prompting them to read expressively by calling their attention to text features, dialogue tags, and vocabulary that can give them cues for appropriate expression. Such prompting causes them to practise looking for the meaning in words and to pay attention to syntax and punctuation. To make oral reading consistently more fluent, try the following strategies: • Capture the mood. As accuracy and automaticity improve, some students still struggle to read with appropriate expressiveness. You can combat this wooden reading by identifying (or asking students to infer) the kind of expression they should impart to the passage based on the general mood or on the affect of a specific character. Then ask them to apply it. In terms of general mood, it might involve asking a student to try to capture the tension of a key scene in the The science OF READING For improvements in confidence and fluency, try the FASE approach, suggest Doug Lemov , Colleen Driggs , and Erica Woolway 54 | www.teachwire.net