Communication Access Real‑time Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. Consumer should check with the moderator for any clarification of material.
This text-based course is a transcript of the live seminar, “Building Better Readers: Focus on Reading Fluency,” presented by Shari Robertson, Ph.D., CCC-SLP.
>> Shari: Well, hello. I'm happy to be here and happy to see so many folks sharing their lunch hour with me. I always like to begin with the ASHA Position Statement, “Speech‑language pathologists play a critical and direct role in the development of literacy for children and adolescence with communication disorders.” That is terrific and I'm excited about that. It is wonderful that we are doing new things, but it seems like our role is getting larger and larger. This idea of literacy may feel to you like, “Oh my gosh, another “hat” to wear. Have they taken one away?” We know that never happens. But here we are, your friendly neighborhood SLPs who say, “Okay, fine, we will handle it. We will manage it. But how are we going to do that with all the other things that we are doing?”
Focus Efforts on What Works
We are going to talk about ways to work on reading fluency and incorporate it into our intervention without actually having to wear a whole new hat; without sacrificing the clinical goals for oral language. We will discuss ways build it in to what we are currently doing and work on both domains (i.e. reading and oral language) at the same time. We are able to do that by focusing our efforts on what works. If we have so many hats to wear, we want to make sure that what we are doing has empirical support to say that it actually works. We are going discuss a number of strategies that have strong empirical support that tells us that they actually work. Not only do these strategies work for reading fluency but they build oral language skills at the same time.
2000 National Reading Panel Report
The national reading panel report is a comprehensive review of the research literature that is relevant to effective reading instruction. It identifies methods that consistently lead to reading success. I use this publication very often in my clinical work and research that I do. You can download a copy of it or request a hard copy at www.nationalreadingpanel.org.
The reason I use this as my foundation for discussions on building literacy is because it identifies the five areas that are most critical to reading success. If we had to put our efforts in any particular areas, these five areas are the ones that have been shown to be most crucial in helping children become good readers. The five areas are phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. If you have taken any of my other courses one of the things that I always mention is that the first time I read this report and saw the five areas I wanted to laugh out loud because SLPs have been working on four of them since the beginning of our profession. Working on phonemic awareness and vocabulary has been a part of job forever. Comprehension, whether it is oral or text, is something that we are aware of. We have not spent much time working on oral fluency, but the other four we are comfortable with. Today we will focus on the area of reading fluency.
