Developing Syntactic Sensitivity in Reading Through Phrase-cued Texts

Abstract

F or Bryan, reading is a frustrating experience that he suffers through every day in his regular and remedial reading classes. A third grader, he's still receiving intensive instruction in word recognition even though he appears to have the basic abilities to decode or "sound out" words. Bryan's teachers share his frustration. They recognize that he can, as one teacher put it, "figure words out." Nevertheless, his reading seems laborious, with lack of expression, poor phrasing, and inadequate comprehension.Bryan's special reading teacher decides to try something new. She copies a section of a story that he has been plodding through without much success and lightly pencils in slash marks within the sentences to highlight where phrase breaks occur. The teacher hypothesizes that perhaps Bryan's reading problem is not so much in word recognition as it is in putting words together in naturally occurring and meaningful phrases. The teacher recognizes that Bryan really has received little, if any, instruction in this area. Perhaps a little support or guidance in reading in phrases would help his reading.Did it ever! Almost immediately, Bryan and his special teacher noted im-INTERVENTION IN SCHOOL AND CLINIC provement in his reading. Although his rate did not improve at first, he began to move away from word-by-word reading to reading in meaningful chunks or phrases. His comprehension improved noticeably as well. Bryan's teacher is now working on ways to continue this assistance while helping him to transfer this more proficient reading to conventional, unmarked passages.

Promoting gains in reading fluency: a comparison of three approaches

“…A common concern expressed by teachers is that children often have difficulty reading connected text fluently even though they have learned to decode individual words fairly well (Rasinski, 1994). An important goal of instruction, therefore, is to facilitate children's advancement from word reading to fluent text reading.…”

Syntactically cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers

“…Observations of children reading aloud suggest that this assumption is incorrect. Parsing into phrasal and clausal units seems to be a problem for many developing readers (Chomsky, 1976;Fuchs et al, 2001;Rasinski, 1994;Schreiber, 1980Schreiber, , 1991. Therefore, we should entertain the possibility that parsing of printed material may require a separate learning step over and above the rapid identification of individual words (Schreiber, 1980).…”

Building Fluency Through the Phrased Text Lesson

“…The Phrased Text Lesson is based on the recommendations of reading and language scholars who have recognized the efficacy of such instruction (e.g., Aulls, ; Dowhower, ; Frase & Schwartz, ; O'Shea & Sindelar, ; Rasinski, ). Although the lesson we present is based on phrasing lessons from previous decades (e.g., Rasinski, , ), we feel that more recent research into the importance of phrasing in reading and language comprehension is an impetus for revisiting the importance of phrasing instruction. Here is how the Phrased Text Lesson works.…”

“…Helping struggling readers learn to read in phrases has been suggested as a way to improve fluency and overall reading proficiency (Rasinski, ; ). Indeed, a historical review of research into helping readers learn to phrase text has reported very promising results, not only in improving reading fluency, but also other aspects of reading, including comprehension (Rasinski, , ). More recent research continues to demonstrate both the importance of phrasing in reading and language comprehension (Frazier, Carlson, & Clifton, ) and that many students lack syntactic awareness and sensitivity to phrase appropriately when reading (Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, ; Gattorda, Stanovich, & Siegel, ; Leikin & Assayag‐Bouskila, ; Mokhtari & Thompson, ; Rasinski, ; Young & Bower, ).…”