This chapter made me realize how incredibly hard and frustrating it must be for students who struggle with word recognition and automaticity. Beers states that, " Fluent readers know the words automatically, spending their cognitive energy on constructing meaning" (205). Struggling readers; however, lack skills in automaticity and spend most of their energy trying to get through a text which makes comprehension difficult for them.
Beers, offers several suggestions for helping students with fluency. Her first suggestion that I found useful is to teach students high-frequency words and sight words. If a student learns to recognize words that appear often in texts they will spend less time struggling while they read.
Another suggestion that I found useful is to have students reread a text. They will not only correct mistakes they made previously but will also be able to see how their reading improves over-time. This might also help if the student has to read a short story for class, by re-reading the story they can improve their fluency and comprehension.
In her final suggestion she informs teacher to prompt students if they stumble over a word do not correct them. In my experience if a student stumbles while reading aloud the teacher tells the student what the word is and sometimes what it means. Most of the time the student carries on reading and does not repeat the word that they struggled with. This does not help the student because they will depend on the teacher to tell them what the word is rather than developing skills to figure out what the word is on their own.
If the teacher prompts the student by simply telling them to re-read the passage or giving them more explicit prompts, the student will develop skills that they will need to figure out words and become an independent reader.
I will definitely keep these Beers' suggestions in mind when teaching, and her final points as well.
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I like the suggestions that you made about Chapter 10. I do have one question: Do you think Beers was referring to not correcting older students or students in general? My current field experience is with 4th and 5th graders and the teacher thinks it is important to correct them when they stumble over a word or tell them the word if they can't decode it. But, these are also kids in special education who need more help with reading than their peers. For the students I work with, they need the correction in order to become better readers. They don't have a tendency to use a lot of strategies that other students use especially because many of them are reading well below grade level. I guess I'm just curious what Beers would think about using correction procedures with students in special education who are reading below grade level. I know you can't answer her, but I just wanted you to know that your post really made me think!
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