Teaching Literacy Podcast, hosted by Dr. Jake Downs
Promoting Fluency Through Challenge: Repeated Reading With Texts of Varying Complexity—Full paper in The Reading Teacher + direct PDF link
Synchronous Paired Oral Reading Techniques: Supporting Developing Readers in Connected Text—Full paper in The Reading Teacher
Full Transcript:
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:00):
Welcome to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to be joined today by Jake Downs to talk about the Read Like Us Protocol. Jake, welcome to The Teaching Show.
Dr. Jake Downs (00:11):
Hey, thanks, Justin. Great to be here.
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:13):
Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into talking about the Read Like US Protocol.
Dr. Jake Downs (00:18):
Yeah, I’m a former fourth grade teacher, instructional coach, literacy coordinator as well for a school district, and currently I’m an assistant professor at Utah State University, and I also host a podcast called The Teaching Literacy Podcast for folks that might be interested.
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:34):
Wonderful. And I was first introduced to your work because of a paper that you published, and we’ll put a link to that for anybody who wants to read the full paper about the study you did, the pilot you did on the read Like Us Protocol, but let’s get right into the protocol itself because I think there is quite a lot here that people can take and run with. What was the purpose of the protocol and what does it consist of?
Dr. Jake Downs (00:57):
Well, the idea of the protocol with Read Like Us is repeated reading has been a technique used to support fluency performance or support students’ oral reading fluency for a really long time, and we wanted to take a fresh take on that over the last decade with the common core state standards and other things. There’s been a push for using more complex texts, but we know from research that just sort of throwing more challenging texts at students is actually a way for them to have lower fluency and lower comprehension in that specific text. So we wanted to explore, read like Us as a way to scaffold students up to the task of challenging text, and we did that through using a repeated reading protocol that progresses through a series of readings that also remove scaffolds, has a little bit of gradual release to it to help students be able to access the text and be able to read it accurately and with little cognitive effort to be able to move it automatically.
Dr. Justin Baeder (01:50):
Love it. So a couple of key things here. We’re talking about challenging text. This is not necessarily at the student’s independent reading level. This is potentially above their independent reading level at grade level or possibly above. And it is also read aloud.
Dr. Jake Downs (02:05):
Yes, yes, for challenging text and then the group reading aloud. We did it in a small group format, which lends itself nice for a small group format, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be adapted to a whole group format as well.
Dr. Justin Baeder (02:20):
Good deal. So let’s go through just the five reads. So we’re building fluency, we’re helping students understand how to read this text fluently over the course of these five reads. What are those five reads? We’re not just talking about doing the same thing over and over five times, right?
Dr. Jake Downs (02:35):
Yeah. So I’ll just go through all the reads really quick. The first one is a model read where the teacher is reading the text out loud, students are following along and tracking. The second read is an echo read. So teacher reads sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase, and the students echo it back and with more challenging text. That does tend to be phrase by phrase just because sentences start to get really long and complicated. The next one’s a choral read. So the group is reading the text out loud together as a group. Fourth read is a partner read. So students pair off, and the way we structured it is that the partners were synchronously reading at the same time, so it wasn’t, we wanted to maximize engagement, maximize volume in text. So partners were split up and they were read together out loud at the same time.
(03:17):
In the case of an odd number of students in the small group, the teacher would coral read with one of the leftovers, so that way everyone had a partner to Coral read. And then the last one, we structured it as an independent read. And then a lot of times it was also a performance similar to a reader’s theater. So the students, it was a little thing, they just would stand up and they would perform that text their reading group teacher. But there also were occasions where the teacher would snag the principal to come by, or two groups in the same room would perform for each other, just something small, a small way to have some authenticity to the reading, to add some engagement, to have a purpose for reading that in the final read that the reading would be performed. And then other times when there wasn’t a performance, the students would just whisper, read that last passage, the passage to themself on their own for the last read. So that’s how the five reads progressed from very high teacher responsibility with modeling the text to, in the end, the students performing the text on their own.
Dr. Justin Baeder (04:19):
So they’re hearing it red the first time they hear all of the words, they hear the diction, they hear the prosody
Dr. Jake Downs (04:26):
Just making the text sound like language, like the way you would converse.
Dr. Justin Baeder (04:31):
So they know what to do, they’re hearing it, they’re practicing it, and ultimately they are performing the reading or part of it themselves. And we can’t get into the whole study right now, but that had a pretty big impact on fluency, right?
Dr. Jake Downs (04:45):
Yeah, it definitely did. We did get longitudinal effects at, we did pre-post assessment at the post students where they were more automatic. And with our group of fourth graders that we looked at specifically, they actually had increases in vocabulary as well, which would make sense with the challenge of text they’re reading. But we also did a breadth of text across a lot of different genre areas. So they were getting a diverse array of academic language structures and different vocabulary words in different domain areas.
Dr. Justin Baeder (05:12):
I wanted to ask about that because certainly people could think of lots of different possibilities. What were some of those genres that people could potentially use? The Read Like Us Protocol with
Dr. Jake Downs (05:25):
The genres we used in this one, and there’s a second iteration that we did as well that we’re currently writing up, but we used things like poetry. We had folk tales in there. We had a genre that was strange state laws, which the kids really got a kick out of different things that you can or cannot do in different states. We had another genre of types of engineers was another type of genre. So in this sense, we were aiming for breadth that sometimes repeated reading and wide reading sort of get looked at as being in these two separate buckets. And we actually said, well, what if it was the same bucket? What if we repeatedly read in texts? But over the course of time, we covered a lot of different genres and a lot of different complexities. So these were third and fourth grade students that we used in our pilot. The texts ranged from most, some of them were third grade, most of them were more in the fourth grade, but they even had middle grade texts that were in the six seven Lexile grade bandwidth. So it was a range of texts of varying complexity, but also a lot of different genres as a way to provide students support with the academic language and the vocabulary and the being able to consume a text really productively was the goal of what we were trying to do.
Dr. Justin Baeder (06:39):
So everybody gets to be successful with it, right? Everybody reads it, everybody reads it fluently. Even if they couldn’t have necessarily done that on their own to start with, everybody gets across the finish line and has read the text fluently multiple times at the end.
Dr. Jake Downs (06:53):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s the goal.
Dr. Justin Baeder (06:56):
Well, we’ll link to the full paper and the study that you did so that people can read that for themselves. Let’s see. Any last words? Anything else you want me to ask about or anything you want to plug here?
Dr. Jake Downs (07:08):
I just would plug that, I mean, that’s the basic protocol, but there’s a lot of different directions you can head with it. Like, okay, if the echo reading is too clunky, then skip the Echo reading and do two choral reads. Or five isn’t necessarily the magic number here. It could be four, it could be six, it could be three. But just trying to say, can we get repeated reading in with a text? Can we have it move from more of a teacher scaffold at the beginning to students being more independent with the text by the end? And there’s also lots of opportunity to integrate comprehension with it as well. What if this was a science text that’s aligned with NGSS standards you’re working on? So to build background knowledge with each subsequent read, you have a different text purpose, you have a different thing you’re trying to harvest from that text. So read one, we’re looking for big idea number one, read two, we’re looking for big idea number two, and then by the end, you sort of stitch those together. So yes, we built it as a basic fluency protocol, but we know that being accurate and automatic in a text can lead to comprehension. So there’s a lot of opportunities to integrate word learning like vocabulary and also comprehension within that protocol as well.
Dr. Justin Baeder (08:13):
Love it. Well, Jake, if people want to listen to your podcast, where can they find that?
Dr. Jake Downs (08:17):
You can find the podcast at teachingliteracypodcast.com, and it’s also on wherever you get your podcasts. I do one episode a month and I interview reading researchers about work they’ve conducted and what it means for practice. So very much in the same vein of what you’re doing on your platforms, Justin.
Dr. Justin Baeder (08:32):
Wonderful. Well, Jake, thanks so much for joining me on the teaching Show. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Jake Downs (08:36):
Hey, thanks for having me. It’s been great.
