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Fluency
- Fluency is reading text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression.
National Reading Panel (NRP) Conclusion: : "Fluency depends upon well developed word recognition skills, but such skills do not inevitably lead to fluency" (p.3-1)
| Further NRP Findings | How My Reading Coach Gold Meets NRP Research |
|---|---|
| "The analysis of guided oral reading procedures led to the conclusion that such procedures had a consistent and positive impact on word recognition, fluency and comprehension." (p.3-3) | My Reading Coach comes with 15 teacher-guided oral reading lessons. A single student or a small group of students can complete these 15 lessons with a teacher, paraprofessional or a family member. |
| "Children who do not develop reading fluency, no matter how bright they are, will continue to read slowly and with great effort." (p. 3-3) | Fluency must be taught. My Reading Coach teaches a student to Read Like You Talk™. This fluency technique is easy to learn and apply. |
| "The demonstrated effectiveness of guided oral reading compared to the lack of demonstrated effectiveness of strategies encouraging independent silent reading suggests the importance of explicit compared to more implicit instructional approaches for improving reading fluency." (p. 3-4) | My Reading Coach Gold explicitly teaches fluency techniques and then provides students with practice activities. It supplies the teacher with oral reading passages and suggestions on how to use these passages to improve fluency and reading comprehension. |
| "In its early conception, it was recognized that fluency requires high-speed word recognition that frees a reader's cognitive resources so that the meaning of a text can be the focus of attention. However, it is now clear that fluency may also include the ability to group words appropriately into meaningful grammatical units for interpretation. Fluency requires the rapid use of punctuation and the determination of where to place emphasis or where to pause to make sense of a text." (p. 3-6) | Since My Reading Coach Gold is a mastery-based teaching and practice system, all students become proficient at decoding words. This decreases the cognitive load spend on word recognition. The program comes with 24 basic grammar lessons that teach students how to use parts of speech for proper pausing. Students are given direct instruction to read with inflection and emphasis. |
| "The reader must recognize the printed words (decoding) and construct meaning from the recognized words (comprehension). Both decoding and comprehension require cognitive resources. At any given moment, the amount of cognitive resources available for these two tasks is restricted by the limits of memory." (p. 3-8) | My Reading Coach teaches students proper pausing, allowing students to "chunk" phrases into meaningful groups or pictures. This process frees up limited memory and decreases cognitive load. |
| On automaticity (fluent processing of information that requires little effort or attention) - "These processes may be developed only through extensive practice under consistent conditions, which are typical of many skill acquisition situations." (p. 3-7) | My Reading Coach Gold provides consistent instruction and consistent practice in a mastery-based environment. This consistency ensures students gain fluent processing of information that requires little effort or attention. |
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"One of the key reasons for the abiding interest in the word
recognition process is the consistent finding that development of
efficient word recognition skills is associated with improved
comprehension." (p. 3-8)
"Although accuracy in word recognition is, indeed, an important reading milestone, accuracy is not enough to ensure fluency - and without fluency, comprehension might be impeded." |
My Reading Coach Gold initially focuses on encoding and decoding and progresses to word recognition. As early as lesson 7, the program begins adding words and parts of speech to improve inflection, emphasis and overall fluency and thereby comprehension. |
| "However, more skilled readers come to fixate on function words (words such as of, the, to, etc.) less often than on content words." (p. 3-9) | These function words are some of the parts of speech taught in My Reading Coach Gold to improve fluency. (prepositions: of, to, etc. articles: a, an, the) |
| "Competent reading requires skills that extend beyond the single-word level to contextual reading, and this skill can best be acquired by practicing reading in which the words are in a meaningful context." (p. 3-11) | My Reading Coach Gold progresses beyond single words in lesson 9. Students progress from words to sentences and by lesson 30 are reading stories with fluency and comprehension. Students are instructed to understand a story's meaning using the context clues presented within the story. |
