Developing First-Grade Reading Fluency through Peer Mediation By Douglas Fuchs and Lynn Fuchs In this issue of CASL News, the feature article describes reading fluency research being conducted at Vanderbilt University. T he ultimate goal of all reading instruction is to provide children with the skills necessary to comprehend what they read. Reading comprehension depends on accurate word recognition as well as reading fluency–the fast, effortless, “automatic” reading of connected text. For years, many believed reading fluency develops naturally as children learn to recognize more and more words, and that fluency-building activities are unnecessary. Recent research, however, indicates that some children do not achieve fluency even as they learn to read at the word level. The most frequently evaluated activity designed to develop reading fluency is repeated reading. With repeated reading, students read short passages containing recognizable words for a predetermined number of times or for as many times as necessary to reach a specified reading rate. Research shows that low achievers with and without learning disabilities benefit from repeated reading. Few studies, however, involve first-grade children or incorporate repeated reading methods that teachers can readily use in their classrooms. Because prior research suggests repeated reading strengthens reading fluency, and because reading failure is difficult to remediate beyond the primary grades, we recently developed a practical, repeated reading intervention for first grade. We call this program “First-Grade Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies,” or more simply, “First-Grade PALS.” First-Grade PALS Teachers introduce First-Grade PALS by modeling the activities in whole-class format. The teacher plays the role of Coach and the students respond in choral fashion as the Reader. During training, the teacher provides individual children opportunities to play the role of Coach in these whole-class sessions. By the end of the first week of training, all students work in pairs, as the teacher monitors and provides corrective feedback to insure mastery of the activities and cooperation among partners. Each PALS session begins with 3 minutes of teacher-directed instruction. The teacher introduces new letter sounds and sight words and, using about 10 words from the day’s lesson, the teacher leads decoding practice. Then the children work in pairs on Sounds and Words, which includes four peer-medi- ated activities. Each activity is represented on a lesson sheet (see Figures 1 and 2). In the first activity, the Coach points to a letter and prompts the Reader to say its sound. If the Reader makes a mistake or does not know the sound, the Coach uses a correction procedure. When the Reader has said all of the sounds, the Coach marks a happy face on the lesson sheet (Figure 1), and awards 5 points. The second Sounds and Words activity is a blending (or decoding) task on the 8 to 10 words from the teacher-directed instruction. The Coach encourages the Reader to sound out a word presented with dots underneath each phoneme (Figure 1). After the Reader responds correctly, the Coach tells the Reader to read the word fast. If the Reader makes a mistake, the Coach uses a correc- tion procedure. The Coach marks a happy face and 5 points at the end of the activity. About 50 decodable words are presented in this fashion across the lessons. The third activity is reading sight words. From the first-grade Dolch Word List, 113 words are introduced. During Weeks 1-11, words are practiced with a speed-reading game. Readers read as many words as they Number 5 • Winter 2001-2002 CA SLNews Promoting Success in Grades K-3 CA SL Continued on page 2 reading writing math National Center on Accelerating Student Learning