READING FLUENCY: 55 to 75 WPM

This is a brief update of a study being conducted to examine the impact of a meaning-based intervention (MBI) for reading used with two struggling readers.

The intervention

MBI is designed to develop all three cueing systems used by the brain to recognize words during the act of reading: the semantic, syntactic, and phonological cueing systems (www.Readocity.com). It consists of five briskly paced activities within a single session. Each activity is three to eight minutes in duration. Each session takes approximately 15 minutes.  

Fluency

In studies like this, when you examine one thing very often other things of interest appear. After six weeks, a significant improvement in students’ reading fluency has been noticed. These students went from approximately 55 words-per-minute (WPM) to 75 WPM. Although there are many variables in play here and it is much to soon to make any solid conclusions, the data are promising. This initial fluency improvement could be related to the type of activity used here: short passage fluency (SPF)

SPF

Short passage fluency (SPF) is a repeated reading activity that focuses exclusively on reading fluency (Johnson, 2020). The goal is to improve the speed at which students recognize words and process letter patterns. Repeated reading activities are one method that can be used here (Kuhn & Stahl, 2013; Samuels, 2013).  The typical activity has students orally read a passage consisting of 100 to 200 words as quickly as they can. This passage is read three times, with each attempt being timed to determine words per minute (WPM) rates (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Fluency graph for WPM.

However, I have found that struggling readers are often overwhelmed when asked to read this much text. That is why I developed SPF. This is a repeated reading activity in which students are given a short passage of approximately 50 to 60 words. The 30th and 40th word is underlined and one of these is designated as their target. Students are asked to read the passage aloud three times and stop at their target. The duration of each attempt is recorded. Students then record their time for each of the three attempts on a line graph (see Figure 2). This develops a sense of self-efficacy as students see their times improving with each attempt. When students are consistently able to hit their target in approximately 12 seconds, they move up to the next target mark or go to a higher reading level.

Figure 2. SPF graph.

Really Silly Stories

From a neurocognitive perspective, the goal is to strengthen neural pathways and develop neural networks in order to enhance the speed of text processing. Toward this end, the type of text used here is important. We want to maximize the extent to which students encounter familiar words, letter patterns, and sentence structures. Thus, a series of Really Silly Stories have been developed. Really Silly Stories use repetition of words and phrases, and an abundance of sight words. Each story is broken into 6 to 13 daily episodes. Thus, students encounter familiar characters and situations over a one to two-week period. And since students are naturally immersed in conversation every day, much of the text here contains dialogue (see Figure 3).  

Figure 3. Really Silly Stories.

References

Johnson, A. (2020). Designing meaning-based interventions for reading. New York, NY: Guildford Press.

Rasinski, T.V. & Samuels, S.J. (2011). Reading fluency: What it is and what it is not (pp 94-114). In S.J. Samuels and A.E. Farstrup’s (Eds.) What research has to say about reading instruction, (4th ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Samuels, S.J. (2013). Toward a theory of automatic information processing reading, revisited. In D. Alverman, N. J. Unrau, & R. B. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical models and process of reading (pp. 698-718). Newark, DE: International Reading Association