Week 6

There is a strong link between reading fluency and reading comprehension.  Fluency or word recognition is the ability to recognize and read words, while comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning behind words. In the beginning grades, reading fluency is a strong focus so students are able to recognize the symbols that represent sounds and make words; while in upper grades comprehension is more of a focus for using reading to learn.  Without the ability to recognize or decode the words, students will not be able to comprehend their meaning.  Comprehension is employed once a word has been recognized or decoded.  Both aspects of reading are incredibly important for students to be successful readers.

            In my classroom, as I know we have all said many times, I have only seen MEAP prep and haven’t really seen much involved in literacy yet.  We have done DRA testing however, and this was the only assessment I have seen regarding fluency.  The students were timed reading different passages and their accuracy was assessed.  This was really the only way we have so far assessed fluency.  We have also done one exercise in teaching some greek and latin root word then breaking apart words into their roots and affixes to determine meaning; encouraging more decoding strategies.  Other than this, I haven’t seen any ways we teach fluency in our classroom.

            To really understand my students reading development, we need to assess more their ability to decode and their fluency.  A lot of our students have low levels of comprehension and therefore low reading levels.  It is important to know if my students are not comprehending due to the level of the text or because of problems with decoding.  If a students fluency is what is interfering with comprehension, it is important to know that to be able to accommodate to that student.  It is easy for teachers to see students with low comprehension and give them lower level texts or encourage more comprehension strategies, when in fact it may be the students decoding strategies.  It is very important to realize where the interference is coming in and then help those students.  I really am not sure how we would be able figure these out other than using our DRA’s, since I haven’t really been exposed or observed more methods of assessing.