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way he reads it. In terms of a specific character’s affect, a teacher might say, “Wilbur is upset, Diamond. Can you read that sentence in a way that shows that?” or “How is Wilbur feeling right now? What emotion is he feeling? Good . . . can you show me that in your reading?” Asking students to capture the mood of a scene or character conveys to students that how they read a text matters. It also directly supports student comprehension. You can help students do this by calling their attention to dialogue tags and their role as ‘stage directions.’ For example: “The passage says, ‘“I don’t want any,” Mr. Malone said sharply.’ Read that again so his words are sharp.” You can also model the applicable tone in your own reading by intentionally bridging around a dialogue tag and asking students to apply it to the sentence they are reading. In this example, you might say the word sharply in a sharp tone of voice that students could then imitate. • Echo reading and choral reading . Literacy experts suggest echo reading – a teacher models how to read a word, phrase, or sentence, and a student echoes it back, trying to capture the same pronunciation and expression as the teacher – as a strategy to support more fluent reading. This is a practice that can be seamlessly incorporated into your FASE Reading. You might read a sentence and ask a student to begin their reading by echoing your sentence. For some children, this can build their confidence in reading aloud in front of the class. You might also use echo reading to correct dysfluency. Model with the appropriate accuracy or prosody and then ask the student to repeat in order to reinforce stronger fluency. Similarly, you can rely on choral reading for particularly challenging, complex, or dramatic sentences. Rather than ask just one student to read, invite your whole class to copy your model. • Check the mechanics. Developing readers see punctuation but often do not grasp what it is telling them to do in terms of meaning or inflection. Similarly, the importance of syntax – the relationship of the pieces of a sentence and its effect on meaning – is often lost on weak readers. Making explicit references to punctuation and asking students to demonstrate their understanding of it in their oral reading is a useful way to build this important habit of attention. (“There’s a comma there. Remember to pause”; “I want you to pause and breathe whenever you see a full stop”). For syntax, questions like asking students to identify which words told them that a sentence was a question or which words told them that two ideas were in contrast helps them to improve their fluency and therefore their comprehension. • Read, then read again . Not only should we have students reread frequently to support comprehension, but we should also consider asking them to reread for fluency once they have successfully decoded and established the meaning of words and phrases in a sentence. There’s strong evidence that repeated reading is among the most effective tools for building fluency. Even adult readers may need to read a complex passage or a sentence multiple times before it finally makes sense to them. Asking our students to do the same is an important way to support comprehension. By consistently enforcing your expectations and giving students multiple opportunities to read and reread a text, you can encourage students to build lifelong habits that make them fluent readers who love great (and complex) books. TP The latest book from Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading: Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom , (£22.99, Jossey-Bass) is out now. “FASE is a consistent approach to having pupils read aloud so that they follow along” www.teachwire.net | 55 T E ACH RE AD I NG & WR I T I NG