1 Grade Peer-Mediated Reading Fluency Program st
• Purpose: to strengthen First-Grade PALS by adding a fluency component. • Study: PALS vs. PALS + Fluency vs. Controls. • Participants: 33 1st grade teachers; 491 children; 8 urban schools; classes randomly assigned to study groups. • 22 weeks, 35-minute sessions.
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PALS Activities for First Graders
• Phonological Awareness (counting sounds, segmenting, and blending)
• Letter-Sound Correspondences • Decoding (words and sentences) • Fluency (sight words, stories, and book reading)
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What Is Phonological Awareness (PA)? • The ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in words
• PA includes: – Blending – Segmenting – Rhyming – Other types of sound manipulation
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Why Is PA Important? • Children who start out out with strong PA become better readers. • PA can be taught
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What Are Letter-Sounds and Why Are They Important? • Sounds made by individual letters of the alphabet and letter combinations
– The alphabetic principle enables students to understand the relative consistency between letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make.
• Students use known letter-sound correspondences to sound out unfamiliar words.
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What Is Decoding and Why Is It Important? • Identification of unknown words based on letter-sound correspondences, morphemic units, and other word parts. • Decoding skills provide strategies that can be used consistently across many unknown words for word identification. 6
What Is Fluency? • The ability to group words into meaningful grammatical units and to read quickly and effortlessly • Requires automatic recognition of words
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Why Is Fluency Important? • Fluency frees up cognitive attention needed to comprehend text • Fluency can be improved through repeated reading of text
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Overall Structure of First-Grade PALS • Teacher-led practice
– New Sounds, Hearing Sounds/Sounding Out, Sight Words, Rocket Words, Stories
• Partner activities conducted in pairs
– Sounds and Words, Speed Game, Partner Reading (added during Week 10)
• Teacher monitoring • Teams and reward system
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Teacher-Led Practice • Teacher introduces new sounds in lesson • Teacher leads class in hearing sounds/sounding out – Finger counting and saying sounds in words – Sounding out words – Reading words quickly
• Teacher introduces new sight words • Teacher introduces rocket words for story and models reading story
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Partner Activities – Sounds and Words • • • •
Saying sounds Sounding out Reading sight words Reading story
– Speed Game (increase fluency and word recognition through timed readings) – Partner Reading (partners take turns for 10 minutes reading pages from trade books--introduced during Week 10) 11
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Speed Game • Go back to “Read the words.” • Reader reads words three separate times for 1 min. each time. • Reader writes 1st initial of 1st name and which time reading under last word read • If Reader reads farther on 2nd or 3rd try compared to initial reading, fill in star on Star Chart. Incentive given when Star Chart is completed. • Switch roles reading and repeat. 14
Student Pairs and Reciprocal Roles • All students in class grouped into pairs. Each pair had a stronger and weaker reader. Stronger reader was “Coach,” weaker reader was “reader.” When a pair finished an activity, they switched and did it again. • New pairs every 4 weeks. 15
Study Findings • The 2 PALS groups did better than Controls on PA, word reading, and reading fluency. • This remained true for low, average, and high achieving readers.
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Study Findings • PALS + Fluency group did NOT do better than the PALS group on any reading measure. • However, the word reading and reading fluency of students with strong PA before the study did better in PAL + Fluency than PALS only. 17
Figure 6. Interaction effect of pre-treatment Phonological Awareness (PA) for PALS-Only vs PALS+Fluency performance on post-treatment Word Reading. Shaded area represents the region of significance, the region of student pre-treatment PA in which students in PALS+Fluency significantly outperformed students in PALS-Only.
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