Peer Teach, KB Session: Repeated Reading (Staudt, 2009)

posted by Bianca Falke and Mandy Churchill

Reading fluency is an essential skill needed to be a successful reader. Someone who is a fluent reader will show ease of word recognition. Staudt’s article states that often classroom instruction is focused on phonics and comprehension strategies. With this approach students may experience academic failure and show little improvement in their reading fluency. The author feels that with her approach of  using intensive word study with time repeated reading of poetry you can improve reading fluency, word recognition and comprehension. 

Timed repeated reading is an instructional strategy used to increase reading fluency and comprehension. The author feels that with the use of timed repeated readings and poetry you can increase a students' reading speed which can improve comprehension. The author states that this is possible by improving the reading rate, reading accuracy as a result an increase in fluency. The author chose to have the children read poetry during their repeated reading, because she felt it is fun, easy, and has a rhythm to the words. Another article suggests that poetry is the special ingredient to help increase fluency because it contains many word families. In addition to the timed repeated reading the author stresses the importance of offering feedback and guidance to the students to increase their motivation.

Glossary for Staudt article:

 Fluent- The term fluent is defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary as one who is

“capable of using a language easily and accurately or effortlessly smooth and flowing (2010).”

Repeated reading- Repeated reading is a strategy that requires a student to read the

same passage a number of times until a criterion level is reached.

Phonological Awareness- Refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words.

Orthography- Defined in the Merriam Webster Dictionary as the “art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage (2010).”

Morphology- Defined in the Merriam Dictionary as the “study and description of word formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language (2010).”

Syntax- Defined in the Merriam Webster Dictionary as “the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form constituents (as phrases or clauses) (2010).”

Example of a timed repeated reading chart (see Blackboard):