Sum and Substance
My teaching experience has taught me that intensive
remediation in phonemic awareness and phonics
does not necessarily lead to fluent reading for
students with learning disabilities; however, the addition
of timed repeated reading to their instruction
will increase students’ reading fluency. Improved
reading fluency generates additional improvements
in comprehension and decoding skills. Students with
learning disabilities who have strong language deficiencies
benefit from direct instruction in intensive
word study that includes phonological awareness,
orthography, morphology, and semantics in addition
to a program of systematic phonics instruction to ensure
optimal growth in reading fluency. My decision
to emphasize vocabulary development, spelling patterns,
roots, and affixes while using timed repeated
reading to improve my students’ reading fluency was
influenced by research that shows that the more a
child knows about a word, the easier and faster
that word can be read. Vocabulary development
and word knowledge are therefore essential for the
rapid retrieval of words (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001).
Combining intensive word study with the repeated
reading of poetry proved a successful plan for improving
the reading fluency, word recognition, and
comprehension skills of my students with learning
disabilities while at the same time improving their
understanding of how our language works. The poets’
love of language presented a bounty of new and
interesting words for my struggling readers to study.
The rhythms, rhymes, and nonsense made their reading
fun.
risk of forgetting and having to relearn the material.