Assessing a Young Reader's Fluency, Comprehension, and Decoding

Introduction

Next door to where I live is a family with an eight-year-old boy who is in the third grade. He says that he does not like to read but that he has to for school and he hates it. "I don't like reading in class. It's hard to say the words and everybody laughs at me." I asked him if there was anything he enjoyed about reading and he said, "Yeah, when we can stop."

I decided to try a different approach to see if I could engage him more effectively and introduced the topic of comic books. "Do you like Batman or Spiderman?" I asked. "Oh yeah!" So I offered him a few comic books to look at and he enjoyed them, but there was still the question of whether he was enjoying them because of the pictures or whether he was actually reading them. When we discussed the story, it became apparent that he had not read many of the panels but had instead skimmed them, focusing on the pictures more than anything else.

I decided to try yet another route. I asked the boy if he enjoyed listening to others read, and he answered, "Yes." I asked him if his teachers ever read any poetry to him and he said, "No." I retrieved my copies of Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends and read aloud a few humorous poems I thought he would enjoy. He followed along fairly well, laughing in the right spots and indicating that he understood what was being said.

Therefore, I decided to assess the student using selections informed by Fountas and Pinnell (2001) — specifically, I wanted to evaluate his comprehension, fluent processing, and appropriate level of text. I had the feeling that he was able to comprehend considerably more than his reading level might indicate, especially given that he struggled with reading independently but could follow along when someone else read aloud.

Comprehension Assessment

The boy's comprehension was quite strong when I read a poem to him: he was able to explain to me what the poem was about. I read "Nobody" by Silverstein, which plays on the concept of "nobody" actually being a person named Nobody rather than a non-entity. It could be a tricky poem, I thought, but the boy followed along and laughed when Nobody was suddenly personified as an actual person. I asked him why the poem was funny and he explained, "Because he says nobody loves him and at first you think it's because he doesn't have any friends — but he's actually talking about this person named Nobody, so really somebody loves him named Nobody!" He understood the poem perfectly. With his comprehension established, I next wanted to test his reading fluency.

Fluent Processing Assessment

Liben and Paige (2016) state that "a full assessment of reading fluency includes consideration of the three indicators — accuracy, pacing, and prosody." This aligns with Rasinski's (2004) assessment recommendations. Liben and Paige (2016) note that accuracy and pacing can be measured with a single metric called automaticity, which "represents the total number of words read correctly during the assessment (the total number of words read minus those that were misread, omitted, or inserted, often called WCPM or CWPM)."

The poem "Nobody" contains 140 words. I asked the boy to read it aloud to me. He read rather slowly and paused at virtually every other word. Words that gave him difficulty included those with double consonants, such as "peaches" and "listens," and those with double vowels, such as "pears." It was evident that he did not know how to sound out words or what sounds certain letter combinations made. His main difficulty was graphophonetic — he struggled with decoding words at a basic level.

The boy was simply not familiar with the letter-sound relationships and did not have the patience to work through them independently. It was difficult to count how many words he read correctly because it took so long just for him to make out a single word. Even the word "nobody," which is repeated throughout the poem, was difficult for him. Once he read it correctly the first time, I expected subsequent readings to come more easily — but each time it was as though he were reading the word for the first time. He would stop, stare at it, attempt to sound it out, and then realize moments later that he had already read the same word. His visual recognition of letter cues was therefore quite limited.

Conclusion

The boy next door had a very poor attitude toward reading: he stated that he hated it and did not enjoy it at all. However, he did enjoy being read to and demonstrated solid comprehension of the Shel Silverstein poems I read aloud. When it came to reading orally on his own, however, it was evident that he was simply unable to sound out letters or understand the sounds that multiple vowels and consonants make when paired together. Even recognizing words by sight was difficult and tedious for him, so it is not surprising that he hates reading — it is a genuine struggle. I believe it would be in his best interest to be tested for dyslexia, as he did appear in many instances to want to read words backwards and was having difficulty processing them correctly in his mind.

References

Fountas, I. & Pinnell, G. (2001). Guiding readers and writers. Heinemann.

Liben, D. & Paige, D. (2016). Determining reading fluency. Retrieved from https://achievethecore.org/aligned/determining-reading-fluency/

Rasinski, T. (2004). Assessing reading fluency. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED483166.pdf