Literacy in Color: A Science of Reading Aligned Podcast for Educators 11. Unraveling Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Fluency & Comprehension
Dec 3, 2024
14:41
In the final episode of this mini-series on Scarborough’s Reading Rope, we tie everything together by exploring the culmination of skilled reading: fluency and comprehension. We’ll recap the interconnected strands of Word Recognition and Language Comprehension, discuss the role of fluency as a bridge between decoding and comprehension, and unpack why both knowledge-building and strategy instruction are essential for fostering reflective, skilled readers.
Key Takeaways:
- Fluency Defined: Fluency is "reasonably accurate reading at an appropriate rate, with suitable expression," leading to deep comprehension and motivation to read (Jan Hasbrouck & Deb Glaser).
- Components of Fluency: Accuracy, rate, and prosody work together to create fluent, engaging readers.
- Fluency as a Bridge: Without fluency, readers struggle to focus on comprehension. Fluency frees cognitive resources to engage deeply with the text.
- Comprehension Strategies vs. Knowledge Building: Both are essential—strategies help students process text deeply, while background knowledge allows them to make meaningful connections.
- Skilled Reading: The fluent coordination of word recognition and text comprehension is the ultimate goal, as defined on the right-hand side of Scarborough’s Rope.
Related Episodes:
- Episode 7: Unraveling Scarborough’s Rope: Word Recognition
- Episode 9: Unraveling Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Language Comprehension
Resources Mentioned:
- Reading Fluency by Jan Hasbrouck & Deb Glaser
- Tim Shanahan’s Blog post: Knowledge or Comprehension Strategies -- What Should We Teach?
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