Following Comprehensive Assessment Of Camden's Reading

Following comprehensive assessment of Camden’s reading, two main areas were identified in requiring additional support, comprehension and fluency through prosody and word recognition. Overall, his comprehension skills are lacking as demonstrated by his weak SAT scores and FAIR-FS scores. Specifically, as indicated by the QRI-5 results, inferential comprehension proved to be difficult in Camden’s reading comprehension while he didn’t have a problem with explicit comprehension. Literal comprehension involves finding the answer in the text. However, inferential comprehension is a more difficult skill since it requires finding the clues in the text while putting it together with schema to make an educated guess.

So what can an educator do

Allington states, “the preponderance of empirical and clinical evidence supports the relationship between fluent oral reading and good overall reading ability” (Allington, 1983, p. 560). Teacher modeling positively influences fluent oral reading (Allington, 1983; Keehn, 2003). Moreover, repeated reading, students reading text more than once, is an effective method of increasing word recognition and fluency (Allington, 1983; Turner, 2012). One method using repeated readings, Reader’s Theatre, has proven to significantly improve oral fluency as well as increase reading comprehension (Keehn, 2003). Reader’s Theatre is a strategy of reading a story aloud, like a play, using repeated reading and reading with expression and inflection. Prosody, an integral component Reader’s Theatre, is critical in reading fluency. Additionally, prosody is essential in reading fluency and often predicts comprehension (Whalley & Hansen, 2006). Using prosody a measure, Raskinski, Rikli & Johnston (2009) discovered fluency to have a strong correlation with silent reading comprehension. Unlike good readers, struggling readers require ample opportunities for fluency-focused practice (Hudson, Lane & Pullen, 2005), which Reader’s Theatre incorporates. Finally, Keehn (2003) found Reader’s Theatre had a positive impact on not only fluency expressiveness and rate but also on

Camden should be taught to use the clues in the text coupled with background knowledge in order to make inferences. Seeing that questioning techniques are beneficial to inferential comprehension (Caldwell & Leslie, 2013; Hansen, 1981), the think-aloud questioning strategy “How Do You Know?” would be an effective strategy to use with Camden. The “How Do You Know?” strategy (Richards & Anderson, 2003) (Appendix ) involves the teacher modeling how she answers the question “How do you know?’ to make an inference then uses the same question to get the student to make an inference. This strategy will help Camden make connections between the given and implied information as well as examine his thinking so he can verbalize how he arrived at the inference (Richards & Anderson, 2003, p. 291). For Camden to best understand the thinking and the language required to make an inference, teacher modeling is critical. The teacher think-aloud provides Camden a glimpse into a good reader’s thought process (Fisher & Frey, 2010). To document Camden’s growth using this strategy, the teacher can record Camden’s responses to the think-aloud questions (Richards & Anderson,