Lexile Fluency and Instruction Beth Frye and Woody

Lexile, Fluency, and Instruction Beth Frye and Woody Trathen Appalachian State University

7 th Grader’s Reading Assessment Word Recognition Test Informal Reading Inventory Oral Reading Level Prime r Flash Untimed Acc. Comp. Silent Reading Rate Comp. 100 1 st 100 2 nd 100 3 rd 95 98 100 4 th 90 97 86 72 5 th 85 94 86 79 6 th 80 95 86 51 Student’s lexile score is 960 Spelling Rate

7 th Grader’s Reading Assessment (with Time) Word Recognition Test Informal Reading Inventory Oral Reading Level Flash Untimed 100 1 st 100 2 nd 90 100 3 rd 85 4 th Spelling Silent Reading Acc. Comp. Rate 95 98 100 107 100 103 70 90 97 86 100 72 101 5 th 45 85 94 86 81 79 78 6 th 30 80 95 86 65 51 71 Prime r Student’s lexile score is 960

Assessing Reading Fluency in Second through Sixth Grade Morris, R. D. , Trathen, W. , Lomax, R. , Perney, J. , Kucan, L. , Frye, E. M. , Bloodgood, J. , Ward, D. , & Schlagal, B. (in press). Modeling aspects of print-processing skill: Implications for reading assessment. Reading and Writing. Morris, R. D. , Bloodgood, J. , Perney, J. , Frye, E. M. , Kucan, L. , Trathen, W. , Ward, D. , & Schlagal, B. (in press). Validating craft knowledge: An empirical examination of elementary-grade students' performance on an informal reading assessment. Elementary School Journal.

ASU Reading Assessment Study Purposes: (1) Determine normative reading rates across the elementary grades (2 nd to 6 th) • Oral Reading • Silent Reading (2) Examine the components of traditional reading diagnosis in relation to reading rates 250 students (Watauga County), followed 4 years: Longitudinal Data and Cross-Sectional Data Ø 125: 2 nd, 3 rd, 4 th, 5 th grades (Group A) Ø 125: 3 rd, 4 th, 5 th, 6 th grades (Group B)

Variables Word Recognition (Graded lists) 1. Flashed (approx. 1/3 sec. ) (20 wds/list) 2. Untimed Passage Reading (Graded passages) o 4 versions of IRI (A, B, C, D); counter-balanced o normed, reliable, stable (no differences between versions of tests on accuracy, oral rate, silent rate) 3. Oral reading accuracy 4. Oral reading rate 5. Oral reading comprehension (6 ? s/pass) -----------------------------6. Silent reading rate 7. Silent reading comprehension Spelling (Graded lists) 8. Words spelled correctly (12 wds/list)

Spelling, Flash, Accuracy Spelling WRI Flash IRI Accuracy Grade Levels Group A 2 3 4 Year 1 64 41 37 Year 2 81 66 49 48 79 68 51 36 70 67 41 64 46 49 78 66 53 34 70 64 41 36 70 49 30 Year 3 Year 4 5 6 7 2 3 85 60 83 4 5 6 7 70 84 37 2 3 95 93 96 74 83 4 5 6 7 95 96 75 95 96 95 Group B Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 80 82 68 84 96 71 83 95 96 73 80 95 96 73 95 96 96

Reading Rates (WPM) by Grade Level IRI Grade Level In Grade Oral Rate IRI Grade + 1 Silent Rate Oral Rate Silent Rate 130 (52) 91 (37) 119 (50) Mean WPM (SD) 2 nd 107 (38) Difference = 23 wpm Difference = 28 wpm

Reading Rates (WPM) by Grade Level IRI Grade + 1 IRI In Grade Oral Rate Silent Rate 2 nd 107 (38) 130 (52) 91 (37) 119 (50) 3 rd 119 (36) 150 (55) 107 (35) 139 (50) Difference = 31 wpm Difference = 32 wpm

Reading Rates (WPM) by Grade Level IRI Grade + 1 IRI In Grade Oral Rate Silent Rate 2 nd 107 (38) 130 (52) 91 (37) 119 (50) 3 rd 119 (36) 150 (55) 107 (35) 139 (50) 4 th 127 (34) 167 (60) 112 (32) 153 (56) Difference = 40 wpm Difference = 41 wpm

Reading Rates (WPM) by Grade Level IRI Grade + 1 IRI In Grade Oral Rate Silent Rate 2 nd 107 (38) 130 (52) 91 (37) 119 (50) 3 rd 119 (36) 150 (55) 107 (35) 139 (50) 4 th 127 (34) 167 (60) 112 (32) 153 (56) 5 th 128 (34) 173 (60) 112 (30) 155 (52) Difference = 45 wpm Difference = 43 wpm

Reading Rates (WPM) by Grade Level IRI Grade + 1 IRI In Grade Oral Rate Silent Rate 2 nd 107 (38) 130 (52) 91 (37) 119 (50) 3 rd 119 (36) 150 (55) 107 (35) 139 (50) 4 th 127 (34) 167 (60) 112 (32) 153 (56) 5 th 128 (34) 173 (60) 112 (30) 155 (52) 6 th 128 (34) 171 (52) 126 (38) 172 (60) Difference = 43 wpm Difference = 46 wpm

Rate Increase on Same Grade-Level IRI Material from One Year to the Next Oral Rate (wpm) Silent Rate (wpm) Grade-Level Material Year Before In Grade Growth 3 rd 91 119 28 wpm 119 150 31 wpm 4 th 107 127 20 wpm 139 167 28 wpm 5 th 112 128 16 wpm 153 173 20 wpm 6 th 112 128 16 wpm 155 171 16 wpm

Oral Reading Rates (WCPM) *Hasbrouck & Tindal (2006) *Dibels (2007) ASU Data (2007) Utah Data Winter Benchmark Oral (†Adjusted) Oral (WPM) 72 90 102 97 3 rd 92 110 115 114 4 th 112 118 123 121 5 th 127 124 125 6 th 140 125 124 7 th 136 Grade 2 nd Mean: *Hasbrouck & Tindal and Dibels rates represent words correct per minute (WCPM). †ASU oral reading rates are adjusted to WCPM.

ASU Reading Rates--Research Based Grade Level Oral Reading Average Oral Reading Range Silent Reading Average Silent Reading Range Second 107 (88 – 126) 130 (104 – 156) Third 119 (101 – 137) 150 (123 – 177) Fourth 127 (110 – 144) 166 (136 – 196) Fifth 128 (111 – 145) 172 (142 – 202) Sixth 128 (111 – 145) 171 (145 – 197) Average rates and ranges for each grade level are expressed in wpm. These ranges include scores from one-half standard deviation below (31 st percentile) to one-half standard deviation above (69 th percentile) the mean.

Silent Reading and Classroom Implications

Sustained Silent Reading • • Why? Benefits? Successful programs? Stumbling blocks and problems? R 5 and Retooling SSR? Teacher’s Role? Student’s Role?

Instructional-Level Texts + Volume of Reading = Increased GROWTH and Motivation • In matching students to instructional-level texts, the teacher aims to increase students’ word recognition automaticity and comprehension (including literary analysis), as well as improving their motivations for reading and academic self-esteems. • When teachers provide daily opportunities for students to read silently for extended periods of time, students develop reading stamina and increase their volume of reading.

Why Is VOLUME of Reading Important? (See Cunningham and Stanovich, 2001) • Many researchers maintain that reading volume, rather than oral language, is the prime contributor to individual differences in children’s vocabularies (Hayes, 1988; Hayes & Ahrens, 1988; Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Stanovich, 1986). • One of the most consistent findings in reading research is that students’ vocabulary knowledge correlates strongly to their reading comprehension and overall academic success (see Baumann, Kame‘enui, & Ash, 2003). • Over the past few decades, the consensus among researchers is that students add approximately 2, 000 to 3, 500 distinct words yearly to their reading vocabularies (Anderson & Nagy, 1992; Beck & Mc. Keown, 1991).

Wide Reading Vocabulary Growth • If Caleb, a 5 th-grade student, reads for an hour each day, five days a week (in school), at an average silent rate of 175 words per minute, he will encounter 1, 890, 000 words in his reading over a school year. • [175 wpm X 60 minutes=10, 500] • [10, 500 words X 180 days=1, 890, 000] • If 2 to 5 percent of the words Caleb encounters are unknown to him, he will encounter from 37, 800 to 94, 500 unknown words. • If, as research has shown, students can learn between 5 -10 percent of previously unknown words from a single reading, Caleb will learn, at minimum, 1, 890 new words each year from his reading…

Successful SSR Programs (Pilgreen, 2000; Gambrell, 1996) • Access and appeal of classroom/school library • Conducive environment • Encouragement from teacher (students need to know teacher cares about what they are reading) • Teachers serve as reading role models (at some point during SSR…not the entire time)

Successful SSR Programs… • • Staff training Nonaccountability (no quota approach) Follow-up activities Distributed time to read daily

Stumbling Blocks to Traditional SSR… • Choosing a new chapter book daily • Chronically reading books below independent levels • Getting stuck in same genre or series • “Fake Reading” • Avoidance behaviors • Your thoughts…any others?

R 5 and Retooling SSR • Read and Relax – Students self-select material and have it with them prior to the start of the class…what’s your role in helping students select books? – Students read…no water/restroom breaks…your thoughts? – Teacher logs status of the class…what message does this send to students? – Teacher conferences with students…what about teachers modeling the silent reading behavior, their book choices, volume of reading, and reading for ENJOYMENT?

R 5 and Retooling SSR • Reflect and Respond – What about this type of daily reading log? Date Amount of time spent reading Pages Read (_____) Response to what I read: I’m wondering. . I can see a clear picture of. . I feel sorry for. . I really liked it when. . Can you believe. . . ? I made a connection to. . WOW! Today in my reading. . Interesting WORDS I found while reading and their page #s

R 5 and Retooling SSR • Rap…discussion • Blogging? • Book Reviews – Amazon “A Kid’s Review” – http: //www. spaghettibookclub. com/ • Motivation…

Class Novels and Audio Books • Grade-level novels and silent reading…what does this look like for a child reading below grade level? • Why read whole class novels? • Problems with whole class novels? • Solutions?

Jon… • Jon reads fifth-grade material at a silent rate of 100 words per minute, well behind the rate of an average fifth-grade reader, and he reads fifth-grade material orally with only 90% accuracy. However, Jon is attempting to read the same fifth-grade book (HOLES) as the rest of his classmates. The teacher may choose to assign 30 pages of reading and a follow-up writing assignment for the 90 -minute period. • If so, the average fifth grader, at a silent rate of 170 wpm, will read the 30 pages (7500 words) in about 45 minutes. But it will take Jon, who reads at a silent rate of 100 wpm, around 75 minutes to complete the reading—more time than he actually has. With 90% accuracy, he will also misread over 750 of the 7500 words. In other words, he will finish neither the reading nor the writing assignment.

Jon… • Given material that is too difficult to read, few students are able to sustain interest and motivation (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Ivey, 1999; Strickland, Ganske & Monroe, 2001). • It is almost painful for Jon to read for extended periods of time. Moreover, he faces a choice when asked to read silently in class. Should he continue reading after the other students are finished, thereby letting them know how slow he is? Or, should he pretend to have read the material and begin the writing assignment even though this will obviously demonstrate his lack of comprehension of the unread text?

Jon… • Not only is Jon developing a negative attitude toward reading but, with each passing month, he is falling further behind in reading skills. Because he reads slowly and inaccurately at the fifth-grade level, he reads fewer pages than his classmates each day. Over time, this restricted reading practice contributes to deficits in sight vocabulary, fluency, and content knowledge (Stanovich, 1986; Nathan & Stanovich, 1991). • How might you accommodate Jon in grade-level material?

i. Pods and Audio Books • Audio Books can facilitate students in developing: – Vocabulary – Language Comprehension (thus more readily contributing to class discussions) – Fluency (phrasal chunking) – Focus – Motivation

Audible. com HOLES by Louis Sachar pp. 7 -8 204 word passage; read aloud in 72 seconds. Rate=170 wpm…average SILENT rate of a 5 th grader. Students like our “Jon” will not only be able to “see” the text as he follows along, but also have the added benefit of hearing the text read at the same speed as his classmates who are reading on grade level. • And he will finish in the same amount of time… • • •

HOLES pp. 7 -8 Stanley was arrested later that day. He looked at the guard who sat slumped in his seat and wondered if he had fallen asleep. The guard was wearing sunglasses, so Stanley couldn’t see his eyes. Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-grandfather! He smiled. It was a family joke. Whenever anything went wrong, they always blamed Stanley’s no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-grandfather. Supposedly, he had a great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a onelegged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his descendants. Stanley and his parents didn’t believe in curses, of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone. Things went wrong a lot. They always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He looked out the window at the vast emptiness. He watched the rise and fall of a telephone wire. In his mind, he could hear his father’s gruff voice softly singing to him.

i. Pods and Audio Books High School Freshmen Labeled Learning Disabled in Reading Share. . . • • • Cody: It kind of helped out because the voices on the i. Pod gave the characters different voices. And that really helped me out…to give me the voices in my head so I could remember everybody a little bit better, so it helped out a lot. Dr. Frye: Now when you were reading Romiette and Julio with the i. Pod, would you follow along in you book and read it too? Cody: Yeah Dr. Frye: Good. So what did you think about that process? Like following along…so you’ve got the book in front of you and you’re following along, and you’re reading it and hearing it, tell me about that process. Cody: It just kind of went in better, you could understand everything a little bit better. Well it could it help me picture it a whole lot better.

Joseph… • Dr. Frye: Ok. So what do you think about listening to it…you said you “take it in and understand it…” • Joseph: Yeah, Sometimes I’ll read stuff and where I’m not that good of a reader, I won’t understand things. • Dr. Frye: Ok. • Joseph: Like you’ll get to a difficult sentence and it’ll have a bunch of words in it and you’ll say, “What’s that mean? ” • Dr. Frye: Right • Joseph: And it kind of helps along with that cause you can think about it and you can stop your i. Pod and stuff like that. • Dr. Frye: Because like you said…. • Joseph: Take it all in… • Dr. Frye: It helps you take it all in. I liked that, I liked what you said about that, “take it all in. ” The idea of listening to it and following along and reading it right? • Joseph: yeah

Joseph • Dr. Frye: It’s kind of like a double dip, you hear it and you’re also seeing it. • Joseph: And it helps a lot too, cause you know I used to think they were crazy when they would tell me to look at it and it would help you with your words. And you know but, I’m getting it now, you know, I need to start thinking about that kind of stuff. • Dr. Frye: Alright tell me what you mean about that, that’s interesting. • Joseph: Like my teachers used to say, like we’d listen to it on a tape or something • Dr. Frye: Mm hmm • Joseph: And they’d read it out loud to us and they’d always be “you better follow along cause it’ll help you with your words” you know, back then I didn’t listen to the teachers • Dr. Frye: Yeah • Joseph: Now I just kind of follow along and it’s helping me a lot.

i. Pods and 5 th Graders • 5 th graders, reading below grade level, successfully used i. Pods with an audio version of Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata. The narrator on the audio version read orally at a similar rate to most 5 th graders reading silently. This enabled the students to follow along in their books as they listened to the audio book. Students who were interviewed shared that the i. Pods helped with comprehension, focus, and with the pronunciation of words and names in the text (Hash, 2009). • Also, students identified as Learning Disabled in Reading and as English Language Learners were able to surpass many classmates in the reading by listening to the i. Pod (in other words, they were motivated to read ahead). i. Pods facilitated these students in successfully experiencing and reading the book; students contributed to class discussions and were excited about the opportunity to use an i. Pod in an instructional setting.

Audacity • By using the free audio editing software program Audacity (http: //audacity. sourceforge. net/), teachers may choose to create their own audio versions of books. • Teachers can save the files to the classroom computer if i. Pods or MP 3 players are unavailable.

Planning the Amount of Reading… • How do you decide how many pages students will read each day during your whole group novel reading time?

Planning the Reading… • How many pages can students read silently in 20 minutes? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? • Expected Words Per Minute (Silent or Oral Rate) X the # of minutes they will read = total words read • For example, we might conclude that an average 6 th grader reading silently would read 170 words per minute. • As a teacher you have planned 20 minutes for silent reading (a few chapters). • 170 wpm X 20 minutes = 3400 total words (that you can expect an average 6 th grader to read in 20 minutes)

Planning the Reading… • Total words read / # of words on the page = total pages read. To get the number of pages they may possibly read, the total words read needs to be divided by the average number of words on a page for the book being read. • Total words read / # of words on the page = total pages read. • For example, a typical 6 th grade book has 200 to 250 words per page • 3400 words read / 250 words per page = 14 pages in 20 minutes

Planning the Reading… • This example illustrates that for most situations, 20 minutes of reading time might not be enough. So you would increase the amount of time you give students to read. So let's increase this to 30 minutes: • For example, if we had an average 6 th grader reading The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett, then this is how we might figure out how many pages of text, at a silent rate of 170 wpm, the child would read in a period of 30 minutes. • 170 wpm X 30 minutes = 5100 total words • 5100 total words/250 words per page = 20 pages

Planning the Reading… • So, in a period of 30 minutes, most 6 th graders will be able to silently read about 20 -25 pages from The Wright 3. Use this formula to make sure you give your students enough time to complete the assigned reading. Also, this example should illustrate the importance of reading rate… • Suppose you have a 6 th grader who is silently reading only 100 wpm. In 30 minutes he will have read 1, 400 fewer words, 8 pages less, than the average reader. It would take this reader an additional 20 minutes to finish the same 20 page reading assignment…almost TWICE AS LONG (50 total minutes)! So, think about what is reasonable to ask your students (all of them) to do when you assign reading, give them enough time to read, and accommodate those below-grade-level readers.

What we have loved Others will love And we will teach them how --William Wordsworth

Thank You

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