Readerly Exploration 6
Readerly Exploration 6 - Week 14 - 11/27/23
Rasinski (2012), “Why Reading Fluency Should Be Hot!” (CANVAS)
Applegate, Applegate & Modla (2011), “She's My Best Reader; She Just Can't Comprehend’: Studying the Relationship Between Fluency and Comprehension” (CANVAS)
Big Takeaway
The big takeaway I think the authors wanted was that students are just being pushed for speed reading instead of both accuracy, fluency and comprehension, which is incredibly detrimental as they are able to read text, but not take anything away from it, either because they are too focused on the reading accuracy or speed itself, or because they are unable to read and comprehend at the same time.
Nugget
I think the nugget I got from these readings is that students are falling behind. While this concept is not entirely new, these readings helped reinforce the trend we are seeing in schools with students functioning at much lower levels than what they should be being at in their actual grade, which causes them to fall behind, lose motivation, and struggle as they grow up and need the skills they aren't learning more and more. When there is nothing to build on, you cant add more skills and expect students to just grasp things, so unfortunately there is just a struggle and cycle of lack of development due to the push to get as many kids caught up and together as possible, with or without cutting important learning corners.
Narration
First I read the articles and picked out the excerpts I wanted to use. Then I talked to my boyfriend about what I read in the texts and explained some of the concepts to them, as well as some pedagogical language, before summarizing a bit more about what we were going to be doing and why we were doing it. Then I set up a recording device and recorded his and my responses to the excerpts and each others responses, having a discussion with each other. With this, it was rather easy as he is in a family of teachers and hears from me about my adventures in school, as well as my rantings about the issues I see, and then we found it easy to talk about because he was able to understand what I was saying as well as speak from his own personal experience with his schooling and his heard stories. I found reading the study a bit difficult as always, those being hard to follow. What was fun about this was enjoying hearing my boyfriend’s thoughts as well as engaging him in discussions about what I am both learning and what we both see and hear about from school and family members, plus he said something really good towards the end about pushing kids through which made me think. I wanted to do this readerly exploration with him because of that reason, since I knew he’d have some form of context and connection with this topic, especially since he has shared before his complaints about the school system that he experienced. This exploration helped me think more about how we students my age today still may be affected by these schooling changes, and also the readings helped point out to me how far we are behind and how its only getting worse, so something needs to change, and it starts with this.
Explore relationships with other people through reading by using texts as a shared experience with another person/other people or to gain insight into the perspective of another person / Choose an excerpt from your assigned course reading(s) and share with a family (ish) member to get his or her insight and perspective on it.
“A growing number of studies are demonstrating that fluency is a major concern for students in grades 4 (Daane et al., 2005; Pinnell et al., 1995) and 5, in middle school (Morris & Gaffney, 2011; Rasinski et al., 2009), and in high school (Rasinski et al., 2005). Moreover, authentic fluency instruction as described earlier in this article has shown remarkable potential for helping a wide range of students beyond the primary grades improve their fluency, overall reading achievement, and motivation for reading.”
“The most obvious and disturbing element of these findings is that there may be a considerable number of teachers who are judging the reading proficiency of their students based solely on speed, accuracy, and prosody, divorced from thoughtful comprehension.”
Here is the audio recording of my discussion! It is sped up to fit (again sorry if it is too fast)
