READING FLUENCY IN CHILDREN WHO ARE DEAF OR HARD OF HEARING paper by Lisa Emerson

 Link to complete article to read
http://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1594&context=pacs_capstones

Information from article

We refer to such readers as being fluent and they are easy to identify, as a fluent reader “sounds good, is easy to listen to, and reads with enough expression to help the listener understand and enjoy the material.” (Clark, 1999)

The goals of the paper were:
1) Describe the role of fluency in successful reading comprehension
2) Describe assessments and strategies that have been used to improve reading fluency in hearing
    children
3) Suggest strategies for improving reading fluency skills of children who are deaf or hard of
    hearing.

 The noticeable traits of fluent readers are accuracy, automaticity, and prosody
Without automaticity, a reader’s slow and choppy pace inhibits their comprehension of text.
 A student who is unable to accurately decode words will be unable to understand a given text Hudson, Lane, and Pullen (2005),
An individual who can read with speed, flying over the words with enthusiasm, but then cannot recall what he or she read is not a fluent reader.
 A fluent reader’s prosody indicates comprehension of the text and is reflected in their intonation, emphasis, and rate
Automaticity, or the ability to read words accurately and to recognize words automatically, enables a reader to focus on comprehension.


 First, phonemic awareness enables students to identify the sounds they hear in speech and also to manipulate those sounds.
Second, letter knowledge allows students to recognize the relationship between letters and sounds. Students must grasp that the sounds they hear or say correspond with written symbols. Learning to manipulate these sounds in their written form is necessary for children to become proficient decoders (National Reading Panel, 2000).
Third, students must learn to recognize patterns that are common across words. Being able to chunk words based on observable patterns helps students become truly graceful decoders (Hudson et al., 2009).

 There are many factors that negatively influence successful reading acquisition for children who are deaf

Because of the lack of information about fluency in deaf children, teachers of the deaf must look to resources about fluency skills of hearing children.


"The second thing that caught my attention when observing these students was that the more errors they made when reading (decoding), the less they were able to recall about the story. These errors, conversely, improved during the week as the students read the same story multiple times. A third constructive observation was of the students’ ability to comprehend different kinds of text. The students read either expository or narrative types of text. The students were more accurate at recalling information from narrative texts than from the expository texts."

It is up to educators of the deaf to pay attention to fluency in the classroom as part of the many things that deaf kids must acquire in order to be successful readers. 

My questions following reading the article:
What do the reading panel consider the five components of reading to be?
http://www.scsk12.org/scs/subject-areas/kweb/images/nationalreadingpanel_faq.pdf

Five components to reading instructions -according to the  National Reading Panel (US) are:
Phonemic Awareness
Phonics
Fluency
Vocabulary
Text Comprehension

What discussions are needed with classroom teachers in relation to fluency and deaf students?

Importance of repeated exposure  - busy classrooms - need to make it work.
Benefits of peer tutoring?