Fluncy Boot Camp Analysis

Fluency Boot Camp, Week Two: Phrasing

What is Fluency in Literacy? There are many dimensions of fluency, last week we discussed PACE, this week we will preview PHRASING.

Fluency in reading and writing involves many steps that can be taught at home or in the classroom. An activity that involves cut-up sentences into phrases is a productive activity for children who are having difficulty with reading fluency. When reading continuous print, children seem to forget what they know. It is quite common that they forget, in the moment, about the letters, sounds and words they already learned. When we test in isolation, most students seem to know letter-sound relationships, phonograms, or high-frequency words; however a reader is required to use both

• Had cleaned

• Should have been writing

• Must wash

Here are the verb phrases in action:

• Mom had just cleaned the refrigerator shelves when Lawrence knocked over the pitcher of orange juice.

• Sarah should have been writing her research essay, but she couldn’t resist another short chapter in her Stephen King novel.

• If guests are coming for dinner, we must wash our smelly dog!

According to the research from Pinnel & Fountes, When Readers Struggle Teaching That Works, reassembling a cut-up sentence by breaking-up the phrases helps to improve fluency because it requires learners to:

• Keep the whole sentence in their head
• Attend to the order of words/phrases in sentences
• Search for and use visual information, while thinking about letter/sound relationships
• Check by rereading
• Use known words to monitor reconstruction and rereading

Students can practice phrasing, as an activity at home or in the classroom. Children benefit in their learning of fluency, when they are able to self-monitor. So, in order to synthesize the activity completely, they must first understand how to recognize a noun and verb

I suggest introducing the concept of PHRASING as a whole group, before asking students to independently practice through a variety of activities.

Children are usually engaged when they are read a story. Reading out-loud is an excellent opportunity to practice PHRASING. Ask students to think about the PHRASES, for example in the sentence below:

Playing for time, I circled the van, closing in slowly, and finally saying, “Come out now, or we are coming in after you!”

Here is how this sentence would be PHRASED: pause after time, van, slowly, saying, now, and possibly after are and in.

Playing for time / I circled the van / closing in slowly / and finally saying / Come out now / or we are / coming in after you! / /

Practice how to PHRASE as a group, during a large group read aloud, so that students begin to understand that PHRASING is the placement and length of the reader’s pauses parse the language into meaningful units. This kind of pausing goes beyond acknowledging the punctuation. In good reading, the pauses are logically and well paced; in oral reading, they help the