I must admit that my thinking around having students read aloud for me has evolved over time. Asking some of these vulnerable students to read aloud can truly be an intimidating experience for them, and so for the longest time, I have been hesitant to have them do so. I also know that for older students, gathering data from their read alouds can be misleading. In other words, in some cases their oral reading skills are substantially lower their silent reading skills.
However, my recent studies of reading intervention and assessments has changed my thinking. As I have begun to learn more about reading difficulties, I realized that to truly get a “read” on what the problem might be, we really need to hear the student read aloud.
Let me back up. Reading research indicates that there are five important pillars of reading instruction that hold up the roof of good reading practices: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Standardized tests can help us get some data, but too often those tests are measuring apathy, and disengagement more than comprehension or reading. This does not mean that our standardized tests are ineffective. It just suggests that they can’t tell us everything we need to know. (As a sidenote, standardized tests offer us all sorts of indicators like engagement and motivation. But they also indicate attention. So more and more, I suspect that these standardized tests tell us something about a student’s ability or inability to maintain attention for extended periods of time.)
Student read alouds afford us other critical information. Miscues can tell us that a student might be struggling with decoding, and that they might need either a phonics brush up or a more intensive phonics intervention. But miscues can also indicate other problems, like an inability to attack multisyllabic words, or even a lack of vocabulary. Additionally, read alouds can give us information about things like automaticity. In other words, some readers are doing the early pillars well (phonemics, phonics), but simply haven’t read enough words over time. They can decode, but they aren’t at the place where they recognize words by sight. They aren’t automatic with their decoding.
Finally, read alouds help us to determine their fluency and expression. Fluency helps us to figure out how smoothly they can read, while expression (or the appropriate use of pausing and inflection) give us a good feeling for a student’s understanding of a text.
All of this is to say that having students read for you (especially privately) can give you lots of information. In fact, having them read for you can often be an eye opening experience because you realize that your original expectations were either way too high or (just as often) too low.
Here are some ways you can set up read alouds with students.
Work Time Visits: If you are giving the class 20 minutes to work on or read a given assignment, pull two or three students aside (one at a time) to have them read to you for a moment. I usually set it up like this. “Jayden, I’m going to have you do a little reading for me. Tell me, what have you read so far from this passage? Or what do you know about what will be in this passage?” Then, I say, “Okay, thanks. Show me where you were in this reading. . . Good! Now I want you to read the next paragraph (or two depending on size) for me.” When they are done, I will ask them one question, just to see if they had a general idea of what they read.
Taking Notes: As they leave the interview, I take a few, simple notes. They don’t have to be real detailed (e.g.- Jayden reads slowly or I noticed that Jayden doesn’t fix mistakes as he goes, or Jayden reads very fast without expression).
Applying the Data: Once you have listened to some of your students, it is good to take a moment to develop a plan. You might adjust some of the readings (e.g. shorten or reduce) for the student who is reading really slowly. You might offer more scaffolds (graphic organizers or reading guides) that can help student focus in on the most important details of a text. Do more to frontload readings. Or even choose to read parts of the text aloud to students so that it is accessible. You could also contact me for further evaluation.
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