Mark Weakland Literacy

Reading fluency enables readers to gain a large amount of meaning from a large amount of text in a short amount of time. How can we help developing readers build their fluency? To answer this question, let’s begin with a definition. 
 
What is Fluency?
Fluency is made up of rate, accuracy, and prosody. When students exhibit appropriate amounts of all three, we can say they are fluently reading.  Here’s another way to say it: Fluency is reading the words of any text accurately, at a reasonable pace, and with expression and phrasing that sounds like talking.
 
Accuracy is easy to define and quantify - a student reads each word correctly or not. Likewise for rate - it is words read correctly per minute. But in any given text, how many words per minute should a student read? And is there a degree of accuracy all students must achieve? As we’ll see, these questions are trickier to answer.
 
Last but not least is prosody, sometimes defined as “reading with feeling.” When I listen to students read, I’m listening for appropriate intonation, stress, and phrasing. Prosody is intimately tied to rate and accuracy; it begins when students reach a decent rate of word reading and a high degree of accuracy. But prosody has an even greater chance of blossoming when students also have background knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and a familiarity with genre and text structure. Thus, knowledge built from reading volume and breadth can in turn build prosody.
 
How Can We Think About Rate Scores?
There’s no doubt reading rate is important. Like airplanes rolling down runways, readers must hit some minimum speed to take flight. And once airborne, they must achieve a decent average speed to cross the landscape. In other words, readers must read a certain amount of text in a suitable amount of time. But are there exact numbers that all students must definitely achieve? Not really. 
 
First, benchmark scores vary by assessment. For example, Acadience Learning (formally DIBELS) wants springtime 2ndgraders to read 87 correct words per minute. Meanwhile, AIMSweb wants them to read 92 and Scholastic 94. As for fluency norms, when Hasbrouk and Tindal updated their oral reading fluency norms in 2017, they found that springtime 2nd graders falling in the center percentiles (25th to 75th) read between 72 and 124 words per minute. That’s a pretty wide range.
 
Of course, we don’t want students to read too slowly. But we also know some children are “slow and steady” readers with good to great comprehension. Finally, and I think interestingly, Hasbrouk and Tindal found that with one small exception all of the 2017 oral reading fluency norms were higher than the 2006 ones. What does this say about our reading instruction? And what does it say about the nature of fluency itself?
 
How Can We Think About Accuracy Scores?
Regarding accuracy, it’s important that we give it great attention in our teaching, especially when working with struggling readers. We want to teach developing readers to read through every word, master phonic patterns, and apply decoding strategies and rules as a first line of attack. I’ve learned from researchers like Sally Shaywitz, Louisa Moats, and Timothy Shanahan, and from organizations like the Iowa Reading Research Center, that it is important to build accuracy first, as well as not lose sight of expression and phrasing. As the IRCC puts it, “Reading quality rather than reading speed.”
 
Even as we pay great attention to accuracy, we don’t want to let “the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I recently talked to a reading interventionist who was teaching a 4th grader with dyslexia. After direct and explicit strategy instruction and lots of decoding practice, the student had greatly increased his reading accuracy and self-correction of larger words, in turn deepening his text comprehension and coming to enjoy the act of reading more. But with small words (was, use, then), he was still inaccurate. This didn’t greatly interfere with his ability to make meaning (his teacher deemed it satisfactory to excellent) but it did chronically keep his accuracy score at 97%, just below the 98% needed to move to the upper reading levels. 
 
Because the very act of “moving up” is motivating, the teacher said she wanted to bump her student to the next level, even though he consistently failed to make the cut score. I agreed with the teachers thought. And when I did some research, I found the creator of the leveled reading program was right there with us. Here’s a quote from Gay Su Pinnell: “Rather than setting a rigid criterion for moving a student ‘up’ a level, use informed teacher decision making.” When I touched base with the teacher two months later, she reported her student was doing “just great” in the upper level.
 
In summary, pay close attention to accuracy and rate numbers but temper their power with your intimate knowledge of the reader who sits before you. Yes, teaching reading is a science but it is also an art!
 
How Can We Help Students Strengthen All Components of Fluency?
If you’re looking for effective and practical practices to increase all components of fluency, a great starting point is repeated reading. It comes in many forms, all initially guided by the teacher. All of the following activities are described in my previous blog posts and some are described in my recent Corwin Connect posting.

• Echo reading
• Choral reading
• I read, we read, you read routine
• J. Samuels’ Repeated Reading procedure
• Paint Brush and whisper phone re-reading
• Poetry: Read, re-read, perfect, present
• Chris Biffle’s “Crazy Professor” reading

 
SOURCES

• Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S.T.M.,  Evers-Vermeul, J., &  van den Bergh, H. (2021).  A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Text Structure Instruction on Reading Comprehension in the Upper Elementary Grades. Reading Research Quarterly,  56(3),  415– 434. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.311
• Hasbrouck, J. & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (Technical Report No. 1702). Eugene, OR, Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon. 
• Nation, K. (2017). Nurturing a lexical legacy: Reading experience is critical for the development of word reading skill. NPJ Science of Learning, 2, article 3. https ://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-017-0004-7
• https://acadiencelearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/AcadienceReadingBenchmarkGoals.pdf
• Shawitz, S. & Shaywitz, J. (2020). Overcoming Dyslexia: Second Edition, Completely Revised and Updated Revised. Knopf.
• https://iowareadingresearch.org/sites/iowareadingresearch.org/files/oral_reading_fluency_error_correction_procedure.pdf  Retrieved 4/4/2020
• https://www.fountasandpinnell.com/forum/messages?TopicID=76​
• https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/everything-you-wanted-know-about-repeated-reading(2020) Retrieved 4/4/2020

… whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you…
    - W. S. Merwin  
 
I’m a regular reader of poetry. Sometimes I’ll read online at the Poetry Foundation site or my friend Gloria will email me a poem. But most often I read from one of my collections. I enjoy holding a book in my hand, reading and re-reading a poem while curled in a comfy chair next to the pellet stove (winter) or in the shade of a big oak (spring, summer, and fall). Some of my favorites are found in collections written by Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Gary Snyder, and Maya Angelou or collected in anthologies, where I contemplate the words of Rilke and Rumi. The poet I’m loving right now is W.S. Merwin, whose unpunctuated, uncapitalized lines can be read in any number of ways. Amazingly, each version is a surprise and revelation. If you’re interested, I’d suggest Thanks, a beautiful entry point to his poetry.
 
Poems can play an important part of early reading instruction because they lend themselves to practicing a wide variety of literacy elements, including vocabulary, speaking and listening, genre and author study, phonic-spelling patterns, and comprehension through close reading. Additionally, they can be used for shared reading, small group reading, and independent reading. Finally, most children find poems engaging and enjoy reading them. I attribute this to their brevity, rhythm and rhyme, and ability to evoke a wide variety of feelings and wonderment.  

​One of the great things about poems is that you can easily use them to help students build fluency, especially the components of accuracy and expression. It’s all done through repeated reading. Here’s on possibility for instruction that combines language comprehension and word recognition. First, find three poems of varying levels. Then consider this three-day routine, which you can unfold over two weeks. It contains a good deal of repeated reading, as well as teaches vocabulary, comprehension, and speaking and listening.
 
Three-day Routine
 First Day  (15 -20 minutes)

• Using the upper level poem, engage students in discussion around the title and pre-teach vocabulary words using direct and explicit instruction. All of this builds language comprehension (topic, background, vocabulary) before reading.
• Next, read the poem three times using the I Read, We Read, You Read method (direct and explicit instruction with gradual release). After the first read, point out any rhyming words and discuss any patterns.
• After I Read, We Read, You Read, discuss the poem using shared reading or interactive read aloud techniques. Focus points for modeling and discussion might be text-to-text connections, thin and thick questions, visualizing, and so on. Read a section of the poem, do a think out loud (such as “I think the author is trying to..” or “I see that this sentence connects back to the beginning where…”), and ask questions, such as, “Why did the author use this word,” “What do you think this sentence means,” and “What is the author trying to say here?”

Second Day (10-15 minutes)

• Using the mid-level and lower level poems, talk about the titles and pre-teach vocabulary words. For some poems, you may want to show a picture or two. Also point out rhyming words and discuss their patterns.
• If a poem lends itself to movement, fold it into your instruction. Giving students opportunities to move is always a good idea!
• Next, read each poem three times using the I Read, We Read, You Read method.
• After the You Read, ask a comprehension question that centers on your comprehension skills for the week. For example, if I was focusing on text-to-text connections, I might ask, “What do these two poems have in common?” or “How do these two poems relate to the poem we read yesterday?”

Third Day (10 -15 minutes)

• Have an appropriate number of 3-hole punched copies of each poem ready. For example, in a class of 20 students you might have eight students reading the upper level poem, six reading the mid-level, and six reading the lower. Also, have additional copies on hand in case students want to pick a second or third poem and put it in their individual poetry anthology.
• In a whole group setting, keeping the pace brisk and using a poster or SmartBoard slide, read each poem using I Read and We Read. No need to do You Read because students will have plenty of chances to do this in just a minute.
• Next, pass out individual poems for fluency practice. Students receive the poem that is most appropriate for their current achievement level.
• Using a quiet “1-inch” voice, students practice reading their poem at their desks for one minute. If a student says, “I’m done,” or if he stops reading, “Say, practice it again. Time is not up yet.” Prompt students fine tune expression, phrasing, and accuracy.
• Students pair up. Using a quiet “1-inch” voice, they take turns presenting their poem to each other. This lasts for two minutes. If students say, “We’re done,” or if they stop reading, prompt them as you did for solo reading.
• Students go back to their seats and read their poem one last time.
• Randomly call on two to three students. When called upon, they can either “pass” or present to the class. 
• After each presentation, directly and explicitly describe any reading behavior  you want to highlight and praise, such as effort, accuracy, phrasing, expression that demonstrated meaning, a strong voice, etc.
• After each presentation, have the class provide a round of applause or other cheer. 

​Personal Poetry Anthologies
Personal poetry anthologies grow and expand as the months goes by, reflecting a child’s reading preferences. Each poem in the anthology provides an opportunity for students to engage in re-reading, build their fluency, and share their reading with others.

Regardless of whether or not you use the 3-day routine, put a previously read poem into a binder or folder with the students name on it. I give students the option to take a second or even third poem, each typically at a different level of difficulty. Thus, after two months, some children will have a dozen poems in their anthology while others may have only four or five. If your budget and/or storage space is limited, store poems in a two-pocket folder with or without fasteners. If you don’t use fasteners, I suggest gradually stapling the poems into packets of six to eight (so papers don’t go flying if the poems fall out).

Photos: Two examples of poetry anthologies

​Here’s a list for students giving options for poetry anthologies:
During independent reading time, you can read…

• At your desk or in the cozy chair (sign up)
• With a partner on the carpet- read the entire poem
• With a partner – take turns and read every other sentence
• In a trio – take turns reading the sentences
• With a whisper phone or paintbrush 
• During share time…
• Dramatically read a poem
• Present a poem with buddies, using two or more voices (duo or trio) 

Teaching Tip
Fluent reading unfolds smoothly, with expression and in broad brushstrokes of phrasing. To drive the point home, put out a container filled with small paintbrushes. Then allow your students to take a paintbrush and re-read a poem or passage by pulling the brush smoothly below the sentences It’s a kinesthetic trick that keeps kids engaged as they re-read. Encourage the reading of phrases, smoothly, in broad strokes. Read like a painter, not…like…a…pointer!  

Repeated Reading, pioneered by Dr. Jay Samuels, is a specific and thus capitalized routine for building fluency. But when it comes to uncapitalized types of repeated reading, there are many engaging ways to go. This post looks specifically at choral and echo reading. Both provide support for reluctant or struggling readers, allow the teacher to monitor word pronunciations and note errors, and provide valuable feedback, important because feedback helps readers form the exact pronunciation and spelling of every word. With repeated reading, words can be more fully processed by the brain’s reading circuitry and thus there is a better chance that each word will be stored completely (with all aspects of meaning, sound, and spelling) in the “brain dictionary.”
 
Choral and Echo Reading
During choral reading, students read a short piece of text in unison with the teacher. After the teacher first models fluent reading, students read along and try to match the pace and prosody. The text can range from lines of decodable text or sentences from a leveled reader to a paragraph from an article, a story excerpt, or a book. Another option is a piece of poetry. Depending on the poem and the students, either the entire poem or a specific stanza is repeatedly read.
 
Echo reading is when the teacher models and then the student or students read the same text back. Kindergarten kids typically echo one sentence. To determine the number of sentences for other grades, consider the demands of the text and the abilities of the students. If students need support and the sentences are relatively difficult (longer and/or with higher decoding demands), one sentence will do. But if sentences are shorter and easier to decode, pick two or three for echoing. Otherwise, students with good short term memory will simply “parrot back” a sentence without ever reading it.

​
​Groupings for Choral and Echo Reading
Echo and choral reading can be used with groups of all sizes, from small to whole. When working with students who need a lot of support, use both types of repeated reading every day. Here’s one possibility for what a repeated reading routine might look like:

• In a small reading group, after students have whisper-read their text and you have identified passages that need extra fluency practice, use the I Read, We Read, You Read routine. The I Read provides the model of fluent reading, the We Read is a choral read, and the You Read is an echo read.
• Toward the end of the small group session, ask students to go back into their text, find two or three favorite sentences, and practice reading the sentences on their own for 30 to 60 seconds. Say something about the goal, like “the goal of practicing is read your sentences so they sound like someone talking. You should have smooth reading, in phrases, not to slow or fast, with expression that shows you know what the sentences mean.”
• Finally, ask each student if they would like to read their sentences out loud. Some students will share and others will pass. Regardless, the end result is that all students read selected sentences at least a half dozen times.

 
A Classroom Example
As an example of repeated reading, let's imagine a small reading group of five 3rd grade students who have just finished whisper reading the text at the bottom of this post. Your teacher talk might sound like this:

• Teacher: “I saw and heard many of you using strategies to read the second and third paragraphs. I saw Brian reading all the way through his words and then re-reading. I heard Myra cross-checking for meaning. Let’s go back and build fluency with the second paragraph. Everyone, point to the beginning of the second paragraph.”
• Students: [They point to the word Other.]
• Teacher: "We’re going to do an I Read, We Read, You Read. I will read with a steady rate, with expression, and in smooth phrases. You track with your fingers as I read. [Teacher reads.] Other items are more unusual. Metal daggers…” [Teacher continues to the end.]
• Teacher: “Go back to the beginning if the paragraph. [They point to the word Other.] Let’s read that same passage together. Begin.”
• Teacher and Students:  “Other items are more unusual. Metal daggers… [Teacher and students continue to the end.]
• Teacher: “Good effort. Go back to the beginning if the paragraph one last time. [They point to the word Other.] You read it. Use phrases and expression. Stay together. Ready? Begin.”
• Students: “Other items are more unusual. Metal daggers…”
• Teacher: "I noticed how you broke some sentences into two smooth phrases.  I heard you say, “A harp covered (pause) in glittering jewels.”  
• Teacher: “Before we end our group, look over this page and find two sentences you would like to practice for fluency. [Students look.]  Point to your sentences so I can see the ones you picked. [Students point.] Re-read your sentences for 30 seconds. Do not stop practicing until the timer beeps. Ready? Begin.” [Students track and read until the beeper goes off.]
•  Teacher: “Okay. I saw everyone concentrating and reading. Good effort! Brian, would you like to share your two sentences?”
•  Student: “Pass.”
•  Teacher: “Myra, how about you?”
•  Student: “I looked up and saw a bear reaching down to grab me. Its mouth was open!”
•  Teacher: “Thank you. You read smoothly and with expression!”

 
Upcoming
In my final blog on repeated reading (coming up in two weeks), we’ll dive into why and how to use poetry for repeated reading.

​Throughout my educational career - from special education teacher to reading interventionist to classroom co-teacher – I loved the point in the year when young readers “took off.” Seemingly out of the blue, they suddenly became much more fluent readers. When students entered this stage of their reading development, their rate and accuracy increased dramatically and they were able to confidently and quickly traverse whole paragraphs, even when the written terrain became difficult.
 
For decades reading research has shown us that reading fluency - the ability to read accurately, at an appropriate rate, and with proper expression and phrasing - is essential to reading comprehension (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Stevens, Walker, & Vaughn, 2017). One especially effective and efficient practice that builds students’ reading fluency is guided repeated reading. The activity provides less skilled readers with the opportunity to hear a model of fluent reading and then practice the same passage in a way that minimizes errors. Additionally, reading aloud with others (often with the teacher) builds confidence, lessens the stress of reading independently and supports any student who feels shy or nervous about reading out loud.
 
Capitalized Repeated Reading
Repeated Reading is the specific (and thus capitalized) routine pioneered by researcher Jay Samuels. It has been shown to be effective at improving the oral reading fluency of elementary students, including those with learning disabilities (Kim, Bryant, Bryant, & Park, 2017; Stevens et al., 2017; Lee & Yoon, 2017). 
 
The routine shares these key ingredients with other varieties of repeated reading (such as echo reading, choral reading and Radio Reading):

• Student reading is done orally (as opposed to silently) so the teacher can monitor word pronunciations and note errors.
• The teacher gives support, first when she models the passage and then when the students read along with others.
• The process provides feedback, important because feedback helps readers form the exact pronunciation and spelling of every word processed by and stored within the brain’s reading circuitry (Shaywitz, 2020).

 
Through its very nature, Samuel’s routine gives students lots of reading practice. It goes, however, above and beyond garden varieties of repeated reading.  According to Timothy Shanahan, “Repeated Reading is a particular method … to develop decoding automaticity with struggling readers. In this approach, students are asked to read aloud short text passages (50-200 words) until they reach a criterion level of success - particular speed and accuracy goals” (Shanahan, 2020). Said another way, the routine uses goal setting, instant error correction, and peer mediation to boost all components of reading fluency.

Photo from IRRC's website article on Repeated Reading (courtesy Merrimack College School of Education/Flickr)

​Putting Repeated Reading to Use
Repeated reading of all types typically leads to improved reading performance, especially for low performing readers (Zawoyski, et. al., 2014), with the biggest payoffs being more accurate word reading, improved oral reading fluency, and more reading comprehension (Shanahan, 2020). Still, some schools and teachers don’t make use of this powerful practice. Here’s what dyslexia researcher Sally Shaywitz has to say: “…the proven effectiveness of guided repeated oral reading to increase fluency is too often ignored. That is unacceptable. In fact, the evidence is so strong that I urge adoption of these programs as an integral part of every school reading curriculum throughout primary school” (Shaywitz, p. 233).

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much time and effort to understand and then adopt the practice in your reading block. If you would like to understand Samuel’s Repeated Reading routine well enough to use it with your readers who struggle, here are three resources to explore - just follow the links:

• IRRC blog: Repeated Reading with Goal Setting for Reading Fluency: Focusing on Reading Quality Rather Than Reading Speed
• Reading Rockets Blogs About Reading: Everything You Wanted to Know About Repeated Reading
• Samuel, S.J. (1997). The method of repeated readings. The Reading Teacher. 50 (5). 1997 
  
  

A Final Note
The work of S. Jay Samuels has had a profound impact on the field of reading instruction. Dr. Samuels passed away last year in December. Whether they know it or not, teachers who engage in quality reading instruction have been influenced by Dr. Samuels and countless children have become better readers because of his insights. If you’d like to read about S. Jay Samuel’s life and reflect on his accomplishments, follow this link and read the “in memorium.”
 
Citations and Sources

• IRRC blog: Repeated Reading with Goal Setting for Reading Fluency: Focusing on Reading Quality Rather Than Reading Speed  https://iowareadingresearch.org/blog/repeated-reading-fluency
• Kim, M. K., Bryant, D. P., Bryant, B. R., & Park, Y. (2017). A synthesis of interventions for improving oral reading fluency of elementary students with learning disabilities. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 61, 116–125. doi:10.1080/1045988X.2016.1212321
• LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Towards a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 293-323. doi:10.1016/0010-0285
• Lee, J., & Yoon, S. Y. (2017). The effects of repeated reading on reading fluency for students with reading disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50, 213-224. doi: 10.1177/0022219415605194
• Reading Rockets Blogs About Reading: Everything You Wanted to Know About Repeated Reading www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/everything-you-wanted-know-about-repeated-reading
• Shawitz, S. & Shaywitz, J. (2020). Overcoming Dyslexia: Second Edition, Completely Revised and Updated. Knopf.
• Stevens, E. A., Walker, M. A., & Vaughn, S. (2017). The effects of reading fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities: A synthesis of the research from 2001 to 2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50, 576-590. doi:10.1177/0022219416638028
• Zawoyski, A., Ardoin, S., & Binder, K. (2014). Using Eye Tracking to Observe Differential Effects of Repeated Readings for Second-Grade Students as a Function of Achievement Level. Reading Research Quarterly. 50(2), 171–184.

​The interaction of meaning, sound, and spelling is what gives rise to foundational to reading. From researchers and writers such as Linnea Ehri, Mark Seidenberg, David Share, Gene Ouellette, and Louisa Moats, we know that becoming aware of the individual sounds in words (phonemes) is critical to the development of orthographic mapping –the brain process of associating letters with sounds that ultimately leads to the automatic recognition of a word’s spelling, meaning, and pronunciation. Without well-developed orthographic mapping, children (and adults) will struggle to develop fluent reading and writing. 
 
So, how do we best set our young students on the path of phonemic awareness ?  In his excellent 2015 Reading Teacher article on early literacy research, D. Ray Reutzel identified phonemic segmentation as an activity that gives a lot of bang for buck. To be clear, he still encouraged the teaching of onset-rime, rhyming, and alliteration. But he did emphasize segmenting, a somewhat advanced phonemic skill. So, let’s look at ways to teach the discrimination, segmentation, and blending of phonemes, thus moving students towards the ultimate goal of advanced phonemic awareness.
 
Stretch the Word
When we speak, their individual sounds of words are blended together (co-articulated), making it difficult to hear where one sound begins and the other ends. Plus, oral language goes by very quickly. To help students hear sounds within words, teach them to slow down the speaking of word so they can hear the phonemes within each one. Later they can segment those phonemes more discretely through activities like Tapping  and Zapping (more on this in a minute).
 
To stretch a word, tell your students to pretend the word is a big rubber band. If you live in western Pennsylvania, ask them to imagine a “gum band.” They’ll know what you mean. Grab hold of either end of the word (make two fists and hold them close to each other in front of you). Then slowly pull your hands away from each other, stretching the word out, holding out the vocalization of each phoneme as you stretch.
 
After the rubber band is stretched as far as it can go and all of the phonemes have been drawn out, snap the band back together with a handclap. When students clap, they say the word. In this way, phonemes are blended back together to make a word. Words with continuant sounds in the beginning are best for beginners so choose your words carefully. For example, flip is a good word to start with. It’s stretching and blending would sound like this: ffff-llll-iiii-p, (clap) flip! 
 
To build vocabulary, go beyond common words. For example, when having students phonemically segment closed syllable words, use vast as well as big and dash as well as run. Quickly and effectively define these words for children through direct and explicit instruction.
 
Tapping and Zapping: Using fingers to segment sounds
Stretching a word helps students hear the individual sounds within words. Tapping and Zapping take the ability to the next level – isolating or segmenting those sounds. 
 
Tapping involves extending your non-dominant arm and then using three fingers on your dominant hand to tap out the individual sounds of a word along your arm, starting up near your shoulder and working towards your wrist. Fish would get three taps (/f/, /i/, /sh/) and flip would get four (/f/, /l/, /i/, /p/). Once the tapping is done, go back to the shoulder and slide your hand down your arm, shoulder to wrist, blending the sounds back together as you say the word.
 
To model zapping, say the target word as you make a fist. Next, segment the word into the sounds you hear, pumping your hand and throwing out a finger for each sound you say. For example, the word it gets two pumps. The index finger comes out when you say /i/. The middle finger comes out when you say /t/. Finally, draw your fingers back into a fist, blending the sounds together, and saying the word.
 
When giving words, it is important for you to say the word and have your students repeat it with you (I Say, We Say) before the zapping begins. I Say, We Say gives a model of the correct pronunciation of the word prior to sound segmentation and an opportunity to repeat that correct pronunciation. After all, one cannot segment phonemes correctly if the word isn’t pronounced correctly. 
 
Hear It, Say It, Zap It, Blend It
Here’s a teaching routine I still run in classrooms. If I use six or seven words, it takes about five minutes. In this routine, keep your instruction direct and explicit, use modeling, and proceed at a brisk pace. The point is to work in lots of practice so the kids can master the technique. Once mastered, children can use zapping as an independent strategy for spelling and reading many unknown monosyllabic words. In this lesson, we’ll imagine the teacher is working with a group of second graders on the r-controlled syllable. 

• Teacher: This lesson is about hearing r-controlled sounds. What is this lesson about, everyone?
• Students: Hearing r-controlled sounds!
• Teacher: The /ar/ sound is spelled a-r. The /or/ sound is spelled o-r. But right now, we are going to simply use our voices to practice segmenting the /ar/ and /or/ sounds from other sounds in a word.
• Teacher: Watch me as I Zap out the word stork. Stork! [Say the word and make a fist]. /s/ /t/ /or/ /k/ [Pump hand, putting out a finger for each phoneme]. Stork! [ Pull fingers back into a fist]. Watch! I’ll do it one more time [Repeat the process.]
• Teacher: Now you try it. Your first word is cord. Say it. 
• Students: Card!           [They make a fist.]
• Teacher: Zap it. 
• Students: /c/ /or/ /d/. [They pump their hand and throw out a finger for each sound, ending with index, middle, and ring fingers out. Then they draw their fingers back into a fist and say the word again.] Cord!    

 
​Stretch It, Tap It, Zap It
With short bursts of repeated practice distributed over time, students can master the art of stretching, tapping, and zapping in just a few weeks. Combine all three – stretching, tapping, zapping - into short routine. Click this link to see me demonstrating Stretch It, Tap It, Zap It. And the pics below show a friend, who appears in my recent book, doing the same. 

In an upcoming post, developing advanced phonemic awareness
While segmenting and blending are necessary skills, they are only somewhat advanced. To increase the chances students will develop strong orthographic mapping, we want to move students farther down the phonological bookshelf to truly advanced phonemic skills: subtracting adding, and moving phonemes to make new spoken words from old ones. In an upcoming blog, I’ll give activities that develop the most advanced phonemic skills.

By the Way
The activities described in this blog (as well as many others) can be found in my new book from Corwin!

Spoken language has sound, from the strings of utterances that we call sentences to the discrete, specific sounds (phonemes) that make up every word. It’s vital that young students become aware of the sounds of language and skillful in their analysis and manipulation, and so today’s post looks at phonology – the study (and teaching) of language sounds. 
 
Phonology and phonological awareness
To begin, let’s be clear on terms. Phonological and phonemic are not synonymous. Rather, phonological is the more encompassing term. Think of it as a big bookshelf labeled “the general awareness of the sound structures of speech.”  This bookshelf is divided into sections that include, moving from the largest sound units of speech to the smallest, whole words (sunset), syllables (sun and set), onsets and rimes (s-un and s-et), and phonemes (s-u-n-s-e-t). Students who are phonologically aware can hear and count the number of words in a spoken sentence, as well as the number of syllables in a word. They can also produce rhymes and alliterations, such as Henny Penny and Peter Piper, as well as segment words into their onsets and rimes, such as P-eter and P-iper.
 
Phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness; it occupies a small but very important space on the big bookshelf. Students with advanced phonological awareness are phonemically aware. This means they not only understands that words are an amalgamation of discrete sounds, but they can also hear individual sounds within any given word, segment these sounds from a whole word, blend them together to create a spoken word, and even create a new word by manipulating, subtracting, or adding sounds.
 
Some languages are made up of over 100 discrete phonemes. Others, like Hawaiian, have fewer than 15. The English language has 44. To discriminate between these sounds, produce them,  and manipulate them, a student doesn’t need to see anything at all and so phonological and phonemic activities can be done in in the dark. In a purely phonological activity, no text is involved. But skillful teaching is!
 
Activities that move students down the bookshelf
There are many activities for teaching phonology, from the word level to the discrete sound level (phonemes). To move students along the shelf, let’s start with two that draw attention to the macro levels of spoken language: understanding that sentences contain words and understanding words have syllables. In the next biweekly post, we’ll move to the micro level: words are made of discrete sounds called phonemes. 
 
Word level: Hoppy Kangaroo
Hoppy Kangaroo helps students in preK and early kindergarten hear and count the number of words in a sentence. Hoppy jumps each time a word is said. If a sentence has four words – The cake is tasty – Hoppy jumps four times. Notice we are not talking about syllables (tasty has two). Rather, the emphasis is on recognizing words, the largest blobs of sounds in language.
 
If you happen to have a kangaroo hand puppet, great. But my Hoppy is a simple piece of clip-art, colored and attached to a ruler. Student kangaroos are the same art, scaled smaller and taped to popsicle sticks. 

To teach, directly and explicitly tell students that sentences are made of words. Then introduce Hoppy however you like. Say Hoppy only jumps when whole words are spoken. Next, say a sentence, such as “I like grapes.” I think it’s best to start with sentences that have only single-syllable words. Have students say the sentence with you and maybe even on their own (I Say, We Say, You Say). As you hold Hoppy, repeat the sentence once more and this time make her hop each time a word is said: “I (hop) like (hop) grapes.” Finally, repeat the sentence once more and have your students count the number of time Hoppy hops. Click here to see a vid of Hoppy in action. 
 
Take the activity to a more advanced level by saying sentences with more words, first four and then five. Bring in some two-syllable words but remember: Hoppy hops on words, not syllables. For preschool and early kindergarten children, six to seven words might be a lot to count but see how far you can go. 
 
An even more advanced form of Hoppy Kangaroo is to put him out to pasture. Tell the kids that Hoppy is away, perhaps having breakfast at the IHOP (know you’re acronyms!). Then say a sentence at a slow to medium tempo and allow students to count the words without the kangaroo.

To connect this activity to text without having to use spelled out words, use the Magic Line. I'll give more on the Magic Line in an upcoming post.
 
Syllable level: Hands Together, Apart, and Away
Advanced phonemic skills include adding, subtracting, and substituting phonemes to make new words out of existing words. Set the stage for this skill by teaching children to add and subtract the larger sound chunks of syllables. Deleting one word of a compound word eases them into this concept; replacing the deleted word with a different word, thus forming a new compound word, takes the skill to the next level. To help children better understand how deletions and additions work, use the hands together, apart, and away activity.
 
To model this multi-sensory activity, turn your back to your students and present the back of your hands to preserve “reading left to right.” With your hands together, thumb touching thumb, say, “Daylight.” Pull your hands apart and say the compound words as separate words: “Day, light.” 
 
Next, put your hands back together and say, “Daylight.”  Then, ask your students to say daylight without day. Model taking away your left hand and gently shaking your right. If they don’t know the remaining word, say, “Light.” 
 
Next, as your students to say daylight without light, taking away your right hand and gently shaking your left. If they don’t know the word, say, “Day.” The pictures from my recently published book show a first grader doing the activity. Click this link to see a video of me demonstrating Hands Together, Apart and Away.

​As with Hoppy Kangaroo, a more advanced form of Hands Together, Apart, and Away is to do the activity without using hands! Once kids can accomplish this with a 2-syllable compound word, go to three syllable words. At this point, unless you are an octopus, you simply cannot use your hands to segment syllables. Have students say a three-syllable word like December. Then ask them to say the word with a syllable deleted. For example, “Say December without the De.” (Cember) Or say, “Say December without the last syllable.” (Decem).” Or ask them, “What is the first syllable? What is the last syllable?”
 
In two weeks, phonemes!
In my next blog I’ll describe Stretch, Tap, and Zap, which move children farther down the bookshelf by teaching them to hear and then segment the phonemes that make up words. 
 
BTW
The activities described in this blog (as well as many others) can be found in my new book, How To Prevent Reading Difficulties, PreK-3: Proactive Practices for Teaching Young Children to Read. Click these links to the preview the book at Corwin or Amazon.

​I had a big “ah hah!” moment when I recently reread Stanilas Dehaene’s book Reading and the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. In a chapter titled Reading and Symmetry, Dehaene, a French scientist who researches the neural basis of reading (among other things), explains why students often confuse letters such as b / d  or d / p and sometimes read and spell words in reverse. It seems printing letters and words in reverse and reading certain words seemingly backwards typically has nothing to do with visual perception or visual memory. Rather, these things most often have everything to do with something called mirror generalization. 
 
Human brains
Like all animal brains, human brains have evolved in relationship to their environment and physiology. Because we live with gravity, our brains can quickly realize that up is very different from down. Also, because our eyes are fixed in the front of our head, our brains know that ahead is very different than behind. But what about left and right?
 
Consider these three objects, which are presented in Dahaene’s book. Do you recognize them instantly? 

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​Did you initially notice they were spatially backwards? In real life they appear this way:

Mirror generalization
Mirror generalization (sometimes called mirror invariance) arises from our body’s symmetrical nature and can be defined as the brain’s ability to recognize objects regardless of their spatial orientation. Imagine you are walking through a tropical forest and you come upon a bunch of monkeys. Some of the monkeys face you, some face away, some are on your left, others are on your right, and a few hang upside down from tree branches. Regardless of their spatial orientation, you instantly recognize all of them as monkeys. Why? Mirror generalization!
 
Through this generalization, our brains automatically recognize an object regardless of how it is spatially presented. A natural function found in children as well as adults, mirror generalization saves us time and energy and helps us survive. In other words, your brain doesn’t care if a tiger, for example, is leaping at you from the left or the right. You brain’s only concern is to instantly recognize the thing as a tiger and then trigger a response in your body – RUN! The same effect holds true if the object is a city bus and you’re stepping out from the curb – STOP!
 
When it comes to letters and words, however, an object rotated in space is not always the same thing. For example, consider this object - b. In the reading world, this object is the letter b and it represent the /b/ sound. Flip it and it becomes something different. Now it’s the letter d, representing the /d/ sound. Rotate it and it becomes something different again, the letter p. 
 
Mirror generalization is why many young children often confuse d / b and may read was as saw or spell stop as post. Simply put, they have not yet learned to suppress their brain’s tendency to register rotated letter forms and reversed letter sequences as the same object.
 
Here’s a Dahaene quote from a section of Reading and the Brain. Specifically it’s about dyslexia but it references all students. The underlining is mine:
 
“As a matter of fact, letter orientation does pose specific difficulties for large numbers of dyslexic children, who often confuse “b” with “d.”  However, these are problems that are present in all children and not just dyslexics…Furthermore, mirror errors peak at between seven and ten years of age, when children learn to recognize letters, and then vanish.… Visual difficulties do not seem to play a dominant role in most of them.” (page 295).
 
Unlearning is the new learning
To learn that an object in one orientation is a b, another a d, and in a third a p, children must unlearn mirror generalization. But this process of suppression (or unlearning) does not happen naturally. How does it happen? Like the unnatural act of reading itself, most children unlearn their tendency to see a d as a b and was as saw through the efforts of teachers. Through teacher instruction, the brains of students are subtly rewired and mirror generalization, at least when it comes to letters and words, is suppressed or unlearned. In the end, emerging readers and spellers are able to at first intentionally discriminate and later automatically discriminate between mirror letters like p / d and words like stop/ post , was/saw, and net/ten.

How can we helps students?
When it comes to helping students turn off their mirror generalization for letters and words, there are a number of things we can do, especially for students who have brain wiring that is resistant to suppressing or unlearning the tendency. Here are some suggestions, many of which are described and explained in my new Corwin book, How to Prevent Reading Difficulties, PreK-3: Proactive Practices for Teaching Young Children to Read. You can also find video examples of many of them on my YouTube Channel:  https://bit.ly/MWLit_YT_Channel​

• Multi-sensory activities like Sky Writing and palm writing can help some students.

• Be patient. To unlearn or turn off the tendency to mirror generalize letters and letter sequences, some students may need more instruction, at a greater intensity and for longer periods of time than others.

• Last but not least, some students benefit from cursive writing. Recently I've learned of some specialized school programs that teach cursive early, meaning the end of kindergarten or beginning of first grade - for students who may have dyslexia (or have been identified as such). 

 
A Final Thought
Here’s why I used the words typically and most often in my opening paragraph. Earlier I gave this Dahaene quote, “…Visual difficulties do not seem to play a dominant role in most of them.” But Dahaene goes on to say this about some students identified as having dyslexia: “In a few rare cases, however, left-right confusion does seem to be the true cause of dyslexia.” (page 295).
 
It seems one can’t completely rule out left-right confusion and mirror generalization as the root cause of dyslexic behavior in a very low number of students. If you are teacher who works with a student who is not responding to intense, frequent, and long-term reading interventions (such as Orton-Gillingham, LiPPS, or Barton), a team meeting and possibly more assessment are in order. 

Sources/Citations

• Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. New York: Penguin Books.

​An editor friend recently alerted me to an Instagram posted by a teacher excited to unlearn an old habit. Previously the teacher had only presented letters to her young students and then asked, “What sound does the letter ___ make” and “What sound does this letter say?” Now her instruction often includes presenting a sound and then asking, “How do we spell the ____sound?” 
 
 “Unlearning is the new learning” is a catchy phrase that reminds us it’s a good idea to replace old ways of thinking with new ones linked to more effective reading and spelling instruction. It’s great to hear of a teacher’s willingness to rub out old routines and replace them with new ones, and I include myself here. I’m glad my stubborn brain is still capable of leaving a rut and heading off in a different direction.
 
In terms of brain circuitry, the processing areas that lead to reading are these: meaning, sound, and spelling. The language pathway (connecting meaning and sound) is one that wires itself and wires itself early. Sure, adults help strengthen this pathway as they interact with infants and young children, but no adult has to directly and explicitly teach a child to hear spoken words and associate them with meaning. On the other hand, the reading pathway must be wired and it is typically wired by teachers. Enter effective instruction.
 
Any teacher exited to ask her students the question “How do we spell the ___ sound” is absolutely on the right track because letters were created to represent discrete sounds of language, not the reverse. Knowing that speech knowledge comes before print knowledge, it makes sense to teach sound-letter associations just as often as letter-sound associations. Also and importantly, when working with some reading disabled students, we may need to teach sound-letter associations very frequently and over a long stretch of time.
 
A quick story: while proof-reading my new Corwin book, How to Prevent Reading Difficulties, PreK-3,  I had an extended conversation with my copy editor about whether to use the term sound-letter association or letter-sound association. In my chapter on activities for teaching orthography, I had toggled back and forth between the phrases but to avoid confusing readers, we felt it best choose only one. I dearly wanted to use sound-letter because the term reflects the sequence of skill acquisition, #speechtoprint. But after scanning a slew of articles and websites, I clearly saw the most commonly used term was letter-sound association. As far as I could tell, Louisa Moats was the only researcher to semi-regularly use “sound-letter association” when talking about teaching young children the alphabetic principal. And so I decided to go with letter-sound.  So much for unlearning!
 
Looking back on it, I should have chosen sound-letter association. I could have been a trend setter! And I should have included more information on how to use sound walls to teach spelling-phonics. Hence this post.

I first learned of sound walls (as opposed to word walls) about 15 years ago during a LETRS training (Louisa Moats and Voyager-Sopris). Sound walls are bridges, helping students cross from speech to visual representation, a.k.a. the letters and letter combinations that represent the 42 to 44 sounds of the English language and come together in specific sequences that make specific written words like shipwreck and kangaroo.
 
Here are what sound cards and sound walls look like:

​By the way, the phonics program Jolly Phonics (developed in the UK) takes a sound-letter approach by using an expanded phonic sequence that includes all the sounds of the English language: s, a, t, i, p, n, c, k, e, h, r, m, d, g, o, u, l, f, b, ai, j, oa, ie, ee, or, z, w, ng, v, oo, y, x, sh, ch, th, qu, ou, oi, ue, er, ar.
 
Interesting, right? And useful for teaching four to six year-old students many of the basic spellings of English language sounds.
 
If you’re a teacher looking to transition from a word wall to a vowel and/or consonant sound wall, at the end of this post I've posted links to an informative article, a step-by-step sound wall construction guide, and three places to purchase sound cards. But first, a final thought.

Students who have or may have dyslexia, often have difficulties processing the individual sounds of language (phonemes). This makes it difficult for their brains' to orthographically map letters onto sounds, as well as store word chunks and whole words in the spelling section of their brain dictionary (Wolf, 2008; Kilpatrick, 2015; Seidenberg, 2017). One way to support all students in spelling-phonics, but especially those who have or may have dyslexia, is to give them lots and lots of practice in analyzing phonemes and then associating those phonemes with letters and letter combinations through reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding). This may be one reason David Kilpatrick gives a shout-out to the LiPPS program (Lindamood-Bell) in his 2015 book. So, if you are a reading interventionist or Title I teacher working with students who have difficulties with automatic word recognition due to deficits in the phonological and orthographic processing areas, give some serious consideration to systematically teaching sound-letter associations with a sound wall! 
 
​Here's a practical and helpful article about sound walls from one of my go-to websites, Reading Rockets:: www.readingrockets.org/article/transitioning-word-walls-sound-walls.

Click this link for a  step-by-step guide from Voyager-Sopris.

Looking to purchase some sound-spelling cards to create a vowel and/or consonant sound wall?  Here are some sources:

• www.tools4reading.com/product-page
• www.collaborativeclassroom.org/programs/sipps/   (sound cards come with the program)
• www.Mrswintersbliss.com

 
Citations

• Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008) by Maryann Wolf.
• Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What We Can Do About It (2017) by Mark Seidenberg
• Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (2015) by David Kilpatrick.

Language comprehension is fundamental to reading comprehension. Thus, it makes sense to help students build and strengthen it. The stronger a student’s language comprehension, the more deeply he or she will be able to understand written text. 

Here’s a classroom practices that builds and strengthens the components of language comprehension, specifically background knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and topical knowledge. Use it prior to a introducing a theme, jumping into a unit of study, or tackling a story or chapter book.

The Slide Show
We all know the power of YouTube videos. In a matter of minutes, one clip can convey a lot of information. But my favorite activity for quickly communicating background and topical knowledge is a modern-day slide show. It imparts much more information than a video and is equally engaging.

In the ancient days of my youth, slide shows were all about hardware. There were real slides (translucent film fitted inside a frame), a hard plastic carousel that stored them, and a slide projector that beamed light through the slides and onto a screen. Today’s slide shows, however, are software-based, made from digital images culled from the internet and pasted into a slideshow app. Unlike video clips, slide shows have no animation or narration, meaning you can create space for contemplation, letting students ponder a particular slide, asking questions about it, and soliciting comments. 

Set Up. To create a slide show, you need an app with a slide show function  like PowerPoint or Keynote. You also need a way to get the images into the eyeballs of kids. This could be a projector and screen, a Smart Board, or even a laptop computer that, in non-COVID times, kids can huddle around. Finally, you need a strong sense of what you want to teach. Examples include a science unit on erosion, a reading genre like fairy-tales, or the setting for a story like One Crazy Summer (summer of 1968 in the city of Oakland, CA) or Owl Moon (the woods on a cold, winter night under a full moon).
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Once you have decided on your instructional focus, do a Google Image query and start sifting through pictures. Choose engaging pics that also tie into the words and concepts you want to touch upon in your upcoming story, theme, or unit. The trick is to pick information-rich photographs that both pique the interest of students and provide vocabulary and background knowledge. Next, import the pictures into your slide show app and make some brief notes (mental or written) about the information you want to impart as you show each picture. Now you’re ready to go.

Modeling. It’s always a good idea to model the behaviors you want your students to exhibit. So, first model how to observe and notice. Using direct and explicit language, explain to students how to scan a picture. Then show them a photo and describe your observations, as well as defining select terms. vocabulary words. For example, this comment goes with the first slide in the figure below: “This boy is wearing a kimono. A Japanese kimono is a traditional kind of clothing. In Japan, people wear kimonos for special occasions.” 

Build in appropriately sophisticated language whenever possible and intersperse the noticing with questions. “What do you notice in this picture?” and “What do you think this picture is showing us?”
The slide show below could be used to build knowledge prior to reading books that reference Japan, such as Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein or  Grandfather’s Journey and Kamishibai Man by Japanese-American author and illustrator Allen Say. Under each photo, I’ve included examples of what I might say to students as I show each slide. These comments are not part of the slides; during a slide show, I don’t show text to students. No matter the content, the big picture goal is to orally building language comprehension through showing pictures and verbally giving information.
Slide shows can be as long or as short as you want them to be.  However, if you make them too short, they won’t give enough information, and if you make them too long, you’ll eat up too much time and your students may lose interest. Keep in mind the age and attention span of the children you teach. A show of twelve to twenty photos is a length to aim for, and total time for the activity is less than 15 minutes.

When to use. I recommend showing a slide show prior to reading a historical novel or any book with a setting unfamiliar to many students. The ultimate goal is to add words and associated meaning to a child’s mental lexicon. Then, when it comes time to read, this knowledge is available to the reader. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a slide show with a dozen or more pictures really adds up!
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Final tips. Some photos generate more discussion and/or questions than others. If you notice that one of your slides is not engaging students or fostering discussion, take note of it so you can replace it with another picture at a later time. Also, team up with two or three other teachers, map out and list slide shows that would be useful in your grade level, and then divvy up the job of finding pictures and creating  shows. If everyone swaps slide shows, you can create and store 10 or 12 of them without too much effort.

In my worldview, everything from climate to culture arises from the interdependent nature of all things. Why should the reading process be any different? In fact, it isn’t. One of the many fascinating aspects of the act of reading is how holistic and emergent the process is. Breaking it apart helps us understand how it works but only when we consider it as a whole can we see its true nature.
 
Kilpatrick’s Intervention Trio
Reading disabilities expert David Kilpatrick references the interconnectedness of reading components in his 2015 book, The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, where he points out how all intervention approaches that lead to highly successful reading outcomes (i.e., weak readers gaining word reading skills at accelerated rates) have three things in common:

1. They aggressively address and correct students’ phonological awareness difficulties and teach phonological awareness to an advanced level.
2. They provide phonic decoding instruction and/or reinforcement.
3. They provide students with ample opportunities to apply these developing skills to reading connected text. 

 
Restating Kilpatrick for the Classroom
If Kilpatrick’s trio is capable of accelerating low-achieving readers to the point where they can catch their typically achieving peers, it stands to reason the trio is also capable of preventing reading difficulties from occurring in the first place. Reading researchers Barbara Foorman and Joe Torgesen say this very thing: “The components of effective reading instruction are the same whether the focus is prevention or intervention” (2001, p. 203).
 
I have restated and slightly expanded Kilpatrick’s list into three general instructional practices. For me, they are guideposts for teaching reading in any primary grade classroom:

1. Teach phonological awareness to an advanced level. Teach it to all students in the earliest grades; teach it to those who need it in the upper grades but here quickly connect it to phonics and spelling.
2. Directly, explicitly, and systematically teach phonic and spelling patterns to a point of mastery, kindergarten through fifth grade, and possibly beyond.
3. Provide many opportunities for all students in all grades to read extended text for extended amounts of time. During this reading, they practice phonic, semantic, and phonological skills in real reading situations. They also build the elements of language comprehension, such as background, topical, vocabulary knowledge, metacognition, and more.

​Residing Together
If young students are to become readers, explicit and direct phonics–spelling instruction must be a daily occurrence. The same is true for opportunities to read connected text for extended amounts of time. But some students may require different content, type of instruction, and/or amount of teaching in each area. One effective way to accomplish this is to differentiate things like phonics–spelling instruction and book browsing bins, as well as the groupings, activities, and schedules associated with guided reading. This differentiation, however, should never reach the point where phonics–spelling instruction supplants guided and independent reading, leading to a situation where a group of struggling readers receives 45 minutes of phonics a day, minimal guided reading, and no time to independently read! For all students, and especially for those who struggle, phonics–spelling, guided reading, and independent reading should reside together.
 
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Citations

• Kilpatrick, D. (2015). The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.
• Foorman, B. & Torgesen, J. (2001). Critical Elements of Classroom and Small-Group Instruction Promote Reading Success in All Children. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice. 16(4), 203-212.