Repeated Reading Is a Great Way to Scaffold Grade-Level Text for Below-Level Readers
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses new research showing that repeated reading of the same passage helps below-grade-level students access complex text.
Key Takeaways
- Repeated reading builds fluency - Reading the same passage multiple times helps struggling readers develop automaticity and comprehension
- It scaffolds grade-level access - Rather than always giving students easier text, repeated reading lets them engage with appropriately challenging material
- This aligns with the science of reading - Fluency practice is a well-supported component of effective reading instruction
Transcript
Can repeated reading help students succeed with above-grade-level text?
There's a fascinating new paper in The Reading Teacher, which is the journal of the International Literacy Association, called Promoting Fluency Through Challenge.
Repeated reading with texts of varying complexity.
And I found this really interesting because what they did in this study is they took students through a five-step protocol where they would read a text, a challenging text, multiple times.
In fact, they would read it five times.
The first time...
the teacher would read or the paraprofessional who's leading the small group would read the text.
The second time, students would kind of do a repeat after me.
It would be an echo read.
The third time, they would do a choral read and all read it together.
The fourth time, they'd do a partner read and take turns with one other person.
And then the fifth and final time would be the performance.
They would read it out loud themselves fluently and have a lot of scaffolding along the way you know, up to that point to make sure that they were successful.
And in this way, students were able to read at or above grade level text, even if as individuals, they were reading below grade level.
And I think this is a really critical issue for reading, that we give students grade level material.
So often, we give students material to read that is at their reading level, which may be significantly below their grade level.
And as a result, students don't get the rigor, they don't get the challenge, they don't get the content.
that they need in their grade level, and they fall farther and farther behind.
So this is a really interesting protocol.
They call it the Read Like Us protocol, and I think it has a lot of similarity to things that people have been doing for a very long time around repeated reading so that students develop the different components of fluency.
And the authors...
quote quite a lot of research at the beginning of the paper, defining fluency as the combination of accuracy, automaticity, and oral reading prosody, which taken together facilitate the reader's construction of meaning.
And what I love about this as a scaffolding strategy for helping students do all of those things is it doesn't really take any prep, right?
You don't have to develop all of these extra tools to support students and scaffold students.
You simply have to read the passage multiple times.
And yes, that takes time, but it pays off if the students understand what they're reading, if they're able to read it, if they're able to pronounce all the words, if they're able to read with the proper expression.
And they use a wide variety of passages from fiction and nonfiction and poetry.
So students are getting a wide variety of oral reading experiences, as well as a wide variety of content.
Now, the one thing that they didn't touch on that I would like to see is doing this as part of a knowledge building unit.
These were kind of random passages, like 50 different passages over 50 different sessions.
I would love to see this done with purposefully selected knowledge building passages that all go together.
Let me know what you think about this approach.