Whenever I have thought about the various reading components, I have always thought of everything from word recognition, concepts about print, fluency, phonological and phonemic awareness, word study, as factors that increase comprehension. To me, all the different reading components work together to help a child comprehend a text. Therefore, I believe that when each component becomes stronger, a child has a greater chance that their comprehension will increase. All of the factors, to me, make a proficient reader, and as Keene and Zimmermann (2007) talk about in Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, comprehension is able to be focused on when learners are proficient readers. In order to be a proficient reader, learners must have word recognition skills, decoding abilities, a fairly high vocabulary (dependent on their age), accuracy, automaticity, fluency, and prosody to name a few. Thus, to me, fluency is a backbone that is essential to comprehension. When learners are not fluent, all of their energy is put towards trying to decode and use context clues or structural clues to figure out words, that phrases are lost, and when phrases are not understood, paragraphs or multiple sentences slip by. Pretty soon the learner has no comprehension of what the story is about. As Rasinski points out, in her article, Reading Fluency Instruction: Moving Beyond Accuracy, Automaticity, and Prosody, fluency needs to be set in place in order for a learner to get past the surface value of the words on the page and start to understand the deeper meaning that lies behind the words.
Currently, in my kindergarten class, I have not had experience with fluency, assessing my learners with fluency, or even teaching fluency. My learners have just started learning how to handle books and look at pictures to tell a story. No emphasis has been placed on fluency, or even reading specific words on a page. Mini-lessons have been devoted to learning how to look at the beginning sounds of a word to try and figure out a word and using illustrations as context clues, but that is the extent of what my learners have learned, in regards to reading. Thus, I have very little knowledge on how we are going to assess my learners in regards to fluency or how it will be taught. I am really interested to see if it is going to be taught altogether, in unison, like Rasinski suggests in her article, or if compression and fluency are going to be taught in isolation from one another. However, I have had experience with how my learners have started approaching automaticity and accuracy. My class has specific popcorn words that they need to know, sort of like word wall words. These are words that “pop-up”: everywhere and that they are required to know. After they have been introduced for a two week span, there is no reason why they should not be able to read the popcorn words or spell them correctly. I am really curious now, after reading this weeks reading, to see if my teacher is going to then start incorporating a fluency component with the popcorn words or if she is going to teach all four components, including comprehension, separately.
In order to fully understand my learners’ reading development, I need to know what they know about letter/sound relationships. Since I am in a kindergarten class, we are teaching them the fundamentals of how to look at words, while teaching them that words are made up of sounds which are represented by letters. Thus, in order to know if my learners are going to be able to stretch out a word to try and decode it, let alone read it with accuracy, automaticity, fluency, prosody, or for comprehension, I need to know if they know which sounds are associated with which letters. I know that I have a handful of learners who do not know which sounds go with which letters, and it makes it very hard for them, both in their reading and their writing. It’s even harder when I have learners who can hear a sound, tell me the letter, but has no clue what the letter looks like. This tells me if that learner was to then try to decode a word in a book, they would be unable to because they would not be able to recognize the letters enough to know what sound went with it. I could find out this information by giving my learners an assessment in which I provide them with a sound and they would have to tell me the letter that is associated with it. This would help me to know which letters my learners knew, how many sound/letters my learners, on average, knew, and if any sounds were exceptionally tricky.
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