Paired Reading - An Intervention to Address Reading Fluency

Last week, I talked about a popular basic-skills intervention. This week, I wanted to present an intervention to build reading fluency. Again, below I hope to present all of the information you would need to get this intervention off it's feet with your own students. If I leave anything out or if I do not explain something well enough, please feel free to leave a comment and I will do what I can to address your concerns.

Overview
Paired reading is an intervention designed to build reading fluency through the student and another person reading in stereo at the student's pace. Paired reading also draws attention to and immediately corrects incorrectly-pronounced words to help support accuracy.

Skills Being Targeted (Rathvon, 2008)

• Reading Accuracy
• Reading Rate
• Word Identification
• Reading Comprehension

Progress Monitoring Probes

As always, there is some room for creativity with regards to creating progress monitoring probes. Typically, a standard probe for fluency investigates rate and accuracy, as these fluency skills are easily quantifiable. However, despite the probe used, listen to the student's prosody while they read. While more qualitative, in nature, these observations are important to ensure the student isn't "reading like a robot" or ignoring punctuation, which could impact comprehension.

Progress monitoring probes for fluency can come from several different sources. DIBELS has several options for fluency probes in which teachers time how long it takes students to read short passages (rate) and mark how many words were inaccurate (accuracy). The DIBELS passages are beneficial since they also provide norms for grade-level performance, which are also displayed on the CBM Focus spreadsheet discussed in a previous post.

Alternatively, you could use passages selected from their reading textbook. You can type them in to a probe generator such as the one that can be found here. This generator also allows for a readability analysis to ensure the passage is on a level appropriate for the student and keeps the format consistent across different probes. 

Finally, if available, you could consider using a published measure such as the Informal Reading Inventory (IRI), which has four different reading sets. The IRI measures fluency and comprehension and helps determine at what grade-level the student is currently reading. Though not particularly adept as a frequent progress-monitoring probe, the IRI could be used at the beginning and at key points during the intervention (i.e., middle and end) to keep an eye on grade-level changes. 

Progress Monitoring Frequency

Progress monitoring for this intervention should take place at least once per week. Again, the more frequent the progress-monitoring, the more informative the data will be. 

Materials Needed

This intervention primarily takes advantage of materials being used in class. It requires:

• Copy of the story or materials currently being read in class or another reading at the student's instructional level.
• Timer/stopwatch
• Progress-monitoring probes

Recommended Frequency/Duration

Again, the logistics of the intervention is flexible depending on the child's needs and school resources and schedule, but I would recommend the intervention last at least 8 weeks, with a formative assessment occurring at 4 weeks. The intervention should last approximately 30 minutes roughly 2-3 times per week.

Steps in the Intervention

1. Meet with the student in quiet room with minimal distractions. Position yourself near the student so that both you and the student can read from the book/passage.
2. Explain the procedure to the student: You will be reading aloud with the student. When the student feels he/she is ready to read alone, they are to tap the back of your hand.
1. When he/she does, stop reading
3. Begin reading aloud. When the student misreads a word, point to the word and read it to them. The student then repeats the word. After the student reads the word correctly, continue reading aloud.
4. When the student indicates he/she wishes to read alone, follow along silently while he/she reads aloud.
5. Offer praise for reading.
6. If the student makes an error when reading alone, point to the word and read it to them. Afterward, begin reading aloud with them again until they give the signal for you to stop again.

Alternative Formats

The intervention as described above includes the student working with the teacher or an interventionist. Alternatively, this intervention can be run using the parents (parent training for this intervention takes about 20 minutes) or with a classroom peer who is a strong reader. Peer-mediated interventions may be helpful when students would benefit from more opportunities to build social relationships with peers. Peer paired reading should be supervised by the teacher. 

The Research

There is a fairly strong research base behind this intervention, with several studies investigating the effectiveness of paired reading. The literature suggests paired reading is highly beneficial to students' reading fluency and tends to be viewed positively by students (Topping, 1987; Fiala & Sheridan, 2003). Therefore, it is safe to say paired reading passes the "evidence-based" requirement of RtI and IDEA 2004. 

References

• Fiala, C. L. & Sheridan, S. M. (2003). Parent involvement and reading: Using curriculum-based measurement to assess the effects of paired reading. Psychology in the Schools, 40, 613-626.
• Rathvon, N. (2008). Effective School Interventions: Evidence-Based Strategies for Improving Student Outcomes, 2nd Edition. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
• Topping, K. (1987). Paired reading: A powerful technique for parent use. Reading teacher, 40, 608-614.

Concluding Thoughts

Above I presented an intervention that focuses primarily on building reading fluency. Like Incremental Rehearsal, this intervention is relatively low-cost and is shown to be effective in the literature. So far, I have gone through a basic skills intervention and a fluency intervention. Next time, I will look primarily at comprehension, followed by something involving writing interventions. My plan is to go through one intervention for each major skill before going back and presenting more, as there are multiple strategies for each skill (fluency, comprehension, etc.). That's it for now.

Until next time!
Steven P. Malm