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Question asked in a preschool/primary teacher PD session on read-alouds: "After our Family Night presentation on home read-alouds, we got so many questions from families and caretakers. How can we give follow-up support?" This teaching guide suggests three simple ideas for supporting parent home-read-alouds with preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade students.

Canines can provide emotional support, create a nonjudgmental environment, facilitate positive social interactions, and shape student behavior. This study investigated the impact of a canine-assisted reading program on four second-grade students' reading fluency and attitudes toward reading. Oral reading fluency (ORF) was measured using ORF probes, and students' attitudes toward reading were measured with the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey. Although ORF skills did not improve significantly following the program, students' attitudes toward reading did. Implications regarding innovative strategies for reading fluency programs, including canine-assisted methods, are discussed, with emphasis on the importance of maintaining reading enjoyment among readers needing extra practice.

Generating accurate inferences is crucial for the successful comprehension of text and is a skill that needs to be supported starting in the early grades. Teachers can support inference-making during read-aloud lessons by asking inferential questions and providing scaffolding and feedback on students' inference-making. In this article, we describe instructional principles to support students' inference-making specifically during read-alouds. We also share findings from our research in K-2 classrooms that show how inferential questions, scaffolding, and feedback in read-aloud lessons can support primary-grade students' inference-making. Finally, we describe steps to design and implement read-aloud lessons for supporting the development of inference-making in primary-grade students.

Many elementary teachers shy away from using expository literature for interactive read-alouds in their classrooms, preferring and privileging narrative texts over this type of nonfiction. This article first shares the complementary benefits of moving beyond fiction and narrative nonfiction in educators' read-aloud practices. Affordances include increased student knowledge and vocabulary, greater understanding of expository text structures and features, and heightened engagement. The article then features lesson plans demonstrating unique ways to use expository books for interactive read-alouds with elementary students. Additionally, readers are provided with high-quality expository texts educators may include in their classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how teachers can build on children's oral language resources to support writing. Thus, we offer recommendations and specific examples for classroom applications that connect oral language with written expression. Specifically, we provide examples on the transition from phonemic awareness to phonics to word writing to sentence writing, and to oral and written responses that address genre expectations. Specifically, we address sentence rehearsals, sentence expansion, and sentence combining that teachers can model and collaboratively conduct so learners use oral language as a vehicle for written production and communication with readers.

According to interpretations of results from the latest oral reading fluency (ORF) study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (White et al., 2020), fourth-grade students who score below the basic standard require interventions that focus on word recognition, phonological decoding, and fluency. Before such mandates for students at the middle grades and beyond are enacted, the available information from ORF assessments should be examined from the view of what students know and what they do not know. In this paper, I examine the performances of students who score below the basic level on oral reading assessments such as those used in the NAEP/ORF study to identify students' strengths and challenges. Results of analyses of students' performances are used to address how instruction and interventions can best support students in developing the proficiencies required to perform successfully on silent reading comprehension tasks. Issues that particularly require attention in the design of instruction and interventions for readers in the middle grades who score below the basic level are the mode of reading (silent or oral), text, and reading volume.

Read Two Impress Plus (R2I+) is a fluency-building routine involving students and a more experienced reader in an echo reading process using culturally and linguistically authentic texts. R2I+ was offered as a partnership-centered, culturally and linguistically affirming family engagement to improve the literacy proficiency of students, aged 7-12, at two urban schools in the Mid-Atlantic. Results of this mixed methods study indicate that the family literacy routine had a positive impact on the participating students' reading fluency. In addition, the engagement had a positive influence on the way family members engaged with their children in reading and literacy practices at home.

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to pronunciations and meanings and stored in memory. Suggestions for teaching these skills are offered. These include picture mnemonics to teach letters, articulation to teach phonemic segmentation, and sound streaming to teach decoding. It is important to teach decoding with grapheme-phoneme subunits rather than syllabic units. It is important to read words in text to bond meanings to spellings in memory. It is important for beginners to read words in text aloud rather than silently. Showing students spellings of new vocabulary words when they are taught improves their memory for the words. Students progress through four alphabetic phases in acquiring these skills. Systematic phonics instruction facilitates movement through the phases.

In this article, the authors share their experiences creating and implementing a unit focused on supporting bilingual identities through integrating language domains and translanguaging with authentic writing experiences. Two dual-language first-grade teachers from Colombia and the US worked together to model, celebrate, and support the use of translanguaging as a meaningful communicative practice that encourages bilingual students to draw on all of their linguistic resources. The article includes the instructional progression used to support emergent bilingual first graders with writing letters and creating interactive videos with the purpose of making new international friends and learning about each other's communities. Practical suggestions with examples provide ideas for building supportive bilingual communities, selecting and reading aloud texts with translanguaging practices, building contextualized vocabulary, developing oral language, supporting letter and video creations, and engaging with and responding to bilingual peers.

Text-related oral participation is ubiquitous in literacy and language instruction. As such, considering how invitations to these interactions are framed is critical, as this framing is directly implicated in the design of equitable classrooms. In this Teaching Tip, one common technique teachers have been encouraged to use--a class set of "equity sticks"--is reconsidered through the lens of asset-based instruction for all learners including emergent bilinguals (EBs). Reframing how EBs are invited to respond to texts requires that teachers get to know their students, privilege multilingualism, provide scaffolding for oral discussion, and encourage responses that transcend linguistic modalities.

Recent research has demonstrated that self-correction is particularly important for beginning and struggling readers; readers who self-correct more make progress more quickly. The authors describe findings from that research, outline how self-correcting behavior might vary, and provide suggestions for how students' self-corrections can inform scaffolded instruction.

Running records can be the assessments that teachers are looking for when searching for an efficient way to plan meaningful literacy instruction. Running records can give teachers immediate insights to guide on-the-fly prompting and teaching decisions to build reader independence. The authors use classroom examples to illustrate how taking and analyzing running records can save time, focus instruction, and identify patterns that might otherwise be missed during guided or independent reading. It is time to revisit and revive the purpose, remember the practice, and reinvigorate the analysis of running records for intentional, individualized instruction.

Drawing on research-informed principles for primary-grade vocabulary instruction, the authors developed a series of engaging vocabulary units for a first-grade class. The units, focused on the explicit teaching of target words and the efficient highlighting of larger sets of semantically related words, involved five complementary elements: reading aloud, explicit teaching of word meanings, rich discussion, independent extension activities, and informal assessment. These elements were implemented within whole-class, small-group, and independent center structures, worked synergistically to support students' word learning, and promoted active student engagement. The authors describe three of the vocabulary units, present data used to document student learning, and discuss implications from the project for teachers searching for feasible, flexible ways to implement rich vocabulary instruction within densely packed daily schedules.

The authors report findings from an evaluation of the reading competence of students in selected elementary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. The work was conducted in eight schools and involved the testing of 450 students in standards (grades) 1 and 5 for competence in comprehension, oral reading, and word recognition. Methods and results relating to each of these three areas of inquiry are described.

This article discusses how to implement paired reading with developing readers to foster students' fluency and reading comprehension. The teacher first helps students comprehend the story with focused discussion questions and the completion of a beginning, middle, and end (B-M-E) chart. Then, the teacher scaffolds students to do the oral reading through modeling, guided practice, and independent practice. Students are encouraged to use a fluency self-assessment rubric to reflect on their reading and think of ways to improve their reading. Once students are familiar with the routine, the teacher can set up a station with a variety of children's books where students can practice paired reading on their own. A bibliography of children's books is provided wherein the two main characters' dialogue carries the majority of the story and font support is provided to aid in prosody.

The three accuracy ranges for oral reading--easy, instructional level, and hard--are familiar to almost everyone who teaches young students just learning to read. It may come as a surprise to learn, then, that no study has yet been conducted with beginning readers to support our well-accepted views about accuracy ranges and their role in reading development. What accuracy range is optimal? Does it really matter if a student reads with less than 90% accuracy? In this article, the authors share what they learned when they explored these questions about oral reading accuracy and student progress.

This teaching tip showcases how students use iPads to video record themselves orally reading. In the Record, Listen, Reflect process, students conduct repeated readings with a familiar text, watch the recorded video, and conduct running records on themselves. Having an opportunity to watch videos of their own reading gives students a glimpse of their delivery and makes them wonder, "Do I really sound like that?"

This article provides classroom examples of how interactive read-alouds of informational texts facilitate collaborative and respectful discussions that promote literacy learning. Several specific considerations for making interactive read-alouds engaging and successful are presented in an effort to support educators in capitalizing on this effective instructional practice.

Educators can take advantage of Latino English learners' linguistic backgrounds by teaching Spanish-English cognate vocabulary using the Children's Choices picture books. Cognates are words that have identical or nearly identical spellings and meanings in two languages because of their Latin and Greek origins. Students can learn to recognize cognates through morphology and orthography lessons on prefixes, root words, suffixes, and spelling patterns. A cognate database featuring the 2014 and 2015 Children's Choices picture books is presented in this article. The database permits teachers to select their own cognate vocabulary for read-aloud lessons. Finally, a sample lesson plan for grades 2-4 is discussed as an example for incorporating morphology and orthography instruction to accompany the selected cognate vocabulary words.

As school districts nationwide have moved toward data driven intervention, oral reading fluency measures have become a prevalent means to monitor progress by assessing the degree to which a child is becoming a fast (and therefore fluent) reader. This article reviews results of a survey of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working with children who stutter. The survey found that children on SLP caseloads are being referred for reading services when they do not actually have any trouble with reading fluently, but instead have trouble with any task that involves speaking fluently. The purpose of this article is to outline potential challenges in the use of oral reading fluency measures for children with speech disorders, and to provide practical solutions to those challenges.

The CCSS framework indicates more difficult texts are to be used with students. However, the rationale for increasing text difficulty, decreasing text difficulty, is unsupported by the research that shows texts have been increasing in difficulty for at least 50 years. Oral reading accuracy is a traditional method of estimating text difficulty. For 70 years oral reading accuracy of at least 95% accuracy has been the accepted standard. The research available suggest that this traditional level of accuracy is supported by the evidence as optimal for developing reading proficiency.

The primary focus of this piece is the fundamental need to read to children to set the scene for their literacy development. It is asserted, reading to all children should happen daily for the first three years of their schooling. The reasons for this assertion are explored and explained: a vast vocabulary is gleaned, learned and used; the simple and complex grammar of language is absorbed, understood, and later used correctly; the ideas embedded in every story, every sentence and every phrase become familiar and comfortable; and all these aspects of hearing language lead to a heightened ability to predict what comes next, thereby assisting children to learn to read far more easily, quickly and happily. The secondary focus of the article is an expression of dismay that so many educators regard reading to children as an expendable part of the literacy curriculum. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This article shares an oral reading practice that develops children's fluency skills, with a particular emphasis on performance reading and prosody. The authors share their experiences with Fluency Idol! as a way to engage young children by tapping into pop culture. The practice emphasizes repeated readings, feedback, practice, and performance while encouraging children to read aloud to one another. Applications to a second grade classroom as well as in a college reading clinic are discussed.

Since Emmett Betts first devised a framework of independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels in the 1940s, these levels have played a large role in classroom assessment and instruction. It is important for teachers to have a deep understanding of the research that supports the reading level framework. This article identifies four key assumptions upon which the reading levels are based: (1) decoding accuracy and reading comprehension are closely linked; (2) independent reading requires nearly perfect oral reading accuracy; (3) oral reading performance is a reasonable proxy for silent reading behaviors; and (4) certain levels of decoding and comprehension difficulty cause frustration. For each of these assumptions, the relevant research base are summarized and implications for classroom practice are discussed. (Contains 1 table.)

Shared Reading is a powerful teaching technique for teaching beginning reading. Technologies such as Interactive Whiteboards now make Shared Reading much easier to do. Large texts are projected on the whiteboard for Choral reading, and interactive features allow students to learn about letter-sound correspondences, spelling patterns, punctuation, and more.

Increasing numbers of English-language learners and the challenge of supporting their learning in social studies and science brought together a group of urban literacy coaches and university faculty. This article describes the development and refinement of a partner reading routine, Partner Reading and Content, Too (PRC2). Partners with similar reading levels read short, informational texts that are part of a text set on the particular unit being studied. Students learn to preview and identify key features of the text and then read the text together sharing in reading orally, questioning and discussing, and then attend to important content vocabulary. Informal assessments used as pre- and post-tests help teachers and students monitor their fluency, conceptual understanding, and vocabulary. Results from classrooms provide evidence of the strength of PRC2 in supporting content literacy and of the impact on students' self-confidence and satisfaction. (Contains 5 figures and 1 table.)

Although they are valid and reliable, one-minute fluency measures are defining and capturing a reduced view of fluency as simply accuracy and rate in oral reading. Thus, they may lead astray our understanding of struggling readers' reading fluency development and instructional needs. Fluency is a complicated construct. The author discusses a deeper view of fluency and presents critical aspects of a deeper view that are missing from one-minute assessments--namely, reasons for dysfluency and the effects of time. The author provides suggestions for fluency assessment and instruction that take a deeper view of fluency into account. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

Elementary, middle, and high school teachers are encountering greater numbers of students who read fast, and many times accurately, but who do not comprehend what is read. The current widely used practice of using one-minute timed passages to practice and assess oral reading fluency may have limitations which will be viewed by considering rate, accuracy, prosody, and comprehension. The role of each fluency component will be investigated along with the relationship between fluency and comprehension. Finally, ways to improve rereading and alternatives to rereading practice will be offered so that comprehension is enhanced. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

Phonics and fluency have been identified as two essential elements in the effective teaching of reading. Although normally considered two distinct elements of the reading curriculum that are separate, through the use of rhyming poetry both phonics and fluency can be taught in a synergistic and authentic manner. In this article, the authors explore how the repeated reading and performing of rhyming poetry can help children learn to read words accurately, automatically, and with appropriate and meaningful expression. (Contains 1 table.)

An effective alternative to the traditional classroom practice of Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) called Scaffolded Silent Reading (ScSR), is described in detail in this article. An implementation of ScSR in a third-grade classroom is presented. Quantitative and qualitative results from a year-long field experiment are reported in which ScSR is compared to the evidence-based practice of Guided Repeated Oral Reading with feedback on third-grade students' fluency and comprehension growth. The evidence reported shows that ScSR can be considered a complementary approach for teachers to effectively engage their third-grade students in silent reading practice. (Contains 8 figures and 1 table.)

The authors designed and implemented a voluntary reading program that was intended to reduce loss in reading achievement over the summer months, particularly for low-income and ethnic minority children. The program had two major components: (1) providing eight books that were well matched to each child's reading level and interests; and (2) end-of-year lessons and activities for teachers and parents to provide support or scaffolding for children's summer reading. Teacher and parent scaffolding consisted of comprehension strategies instruction and oral reading practice. The results of two experiments demonstrated that the program had positive and educationally meaningful effects on reading achievement. These effects were largest for black and Hispanic children, ranging from 1.7 to 5.1 months of additional learning. Simply giving children books without any form of scaffolding did not have positive effects. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the prosodic qualities that direct quotation calls for in oral reading, and the semantic links, especially pronouns, between the speakers in the text and what they say.

A first-grade teacher used comic books as read-alouds during her implementation of a reading/writing workshop. The students, primarily English-language learners, were able to make use of this medium in order to learn new reading practices. The teacher used the comics to teach multiple aspects of various reading processes such as reading with an eye for gendered representations in media texts, reading for recognition of dialogue, and recognizing a problem/solution structure in narrative. The teacher's use of the comics as read-alouds demonstrates their use as instructional texts, because comics provide interesting and motivating material as well as visual support for literacy learning. (Contains 7 figures.)

Story innovation is a form of scaffold writing in which the sentence and text patterns remain intact but the content is altered through the substitution of vocabulary to change the setting, characters, or action in a story. Story innovation is presented as a way to develop vocabulary knowledge through deep processing and to provide fluency practice. Teachers will also find story innovation useful for working with struggling readers or students learning English as a second language. It is a way to foster a nonthreatening, low-anxiety, and highly supportive learning environment. The authors describe the scenario in one classroom in which the students wrote a story innovation, and they provide a step-by-step process teachers can follow when implementing story innovation in the classroom. (Contains 3 figures.)

This article discusses two activities--Readers Theatre and Rhythm Walks--that encourage students to "get moving" with fluency instruction. Movement can be a motivating factor for struggling students, as well as a kinesthetic tool for conceptualizing the rhythm and flow of fluent reading while triggering brain function for optimal learning. Also included is a discussion of the importance of motivating struggling students in order to engage them long enough to elicit changes in reading behavior and to learn to generalize skills to new experiences.

In 1992, the authors collaborated to develop a set of norms for oral reading fluency for grades 2-5. Since then, interest in and awareness of fluency has greatly increased, and Hasbrouck and Tindal have collaborated further to compile an updated and expanded set of norms for grades 1-8. This article discusses the application of these norms to three important assessment activities related to improving students' reading achievement: (1) Screening students for possible reading problems; (2) Diagnosing deficits in students' fluency; and (3) Monitoring the progress of students receiving supplementary instruction or intensive intervention in reading. An overview of the history and purpose for developing measures of oral reading fluency is also presented. (Contains 1 table.)

What do first-grade teachers do and say to scaffold novice readers? To answer that question, this teacher researcher videotaped her own and others' scaffolding behaviors. Analysis of the video transcripts reveals valuable information that can support teachers or tutors as they work with beginning readers. Video data show how first-grade teachers sustain individual readers with a variety of comments and gestures related to four cueing systems: semantics, syntactics, graphophonics, and pragmatics. The article describes the ways in which gestures support readers; how teachers scaffold novices across contexts; and why primary, rather than secondary, cues more efficiently serve decoding. This study also presents quantitative data related to the differentiated scaffolding of novice and fluent readers and demonstrates that scaffolding behaviors change as development progresses. Compared to fluent readers, novices receive lengthier scaffolding periods, more praise and affirmation, more interruptions during reading, and more gestural marking. This study shows that teachers need to enter the classroom knowing both their students and their craft so that they can offer scaffolded instruction anytime it is needed. (Contains 2 tables.)

Studies low-achieving fifth-grade readers to evaluate the feasibility of a cross-age reading program and to clarify implementation details for a large-scale project. Finds that quantitative results and qualitative data suggest that cross-age reading programs are a promising way to help poor readers to improve their reading. (MG)

Miscue analysis has been used by teachers and reading specialists for more than 30 years. Its purpose is to reveal strengths and weaknesses in how children process text and thereby inform instruction for individual learners. But is it still a useful approach? The authors assert that miscue analysis can indeed be a useful tool, though not for all the reasons its advocates have asserted over the years. Instead, educators should use miscue analysis more narrowly to monitor children's use of particular strategies during reading, particularly as they move from context dependency to automatic decoding.

Introduces computer-generated voice prints as a supplement and complement to the current methods of oral reading analysis. Describes voice prints as actual pictures of the child's reading which reveal the pacing, amplitude, duration of utterances, and pauses between or within words. (MG)

Presents a summary of practical experiences with oral reading in a format that gives insights into why listening to children read empathetically is important. Offers guidelines on how to organize and use such a process. (FL)