![]() There’s no downside, and the potential benefits are substantial.Īnd when schooling eventually returns to normal, there’s much more that can be done to boost fluency. That means they can reach children in households too poor to have reliable internet access, which are the same households that are more likely to have struggling readers. They can reach any child who has a TV, as over 95% of American households do. But especially as compared to other literacy-related initiatives, it takes little effort to turn captions on. And other crucial factors go into comprehension in addition to fluency-perhaps most important, and most overlooked, knowledge of the topic at hand. To be sure, captioned TV or videos aren’t a substitute for a rich, interactive, in-person education. Alas, the captions on the Tennessee videos are auto-generated and, while accurate, lack appropriate punctuation.) (To turn on captions on YouTube videos, just click the button marked “CC” at the bottom right. Turning on those captions could be hugely beneficial. ![]() Tennessee’s education department is broadcasting lessons on public television as well as posting them on YouTube, and the English language arts videos consist mostly of read-alouds. But there are lots of videos out there showing adults reading children’s books aloud, especially during the current period of remote learning-including some featuring famous actors that already automatically display captions. One caveat is that watching a captioned video that consists mostly of dialogue won’t help familiarize kids with the conventions of written language, which is almost always more complex than spoken language. In one small study done in England, for example, struggling readers who simply listened to a teacher read two novels aloud over a period of three months made a whopping sixteen months of progress in comprehension, as measured by a standardized test. Still, there’s also evidence that listening to an expert reader can have a powerful effect on comprehension even without repeated rereading-and that the effects also transfer. Kids who watch a captioned video won’t get a chance to engage in repeated rereading, unless it’s a recording and they watch it again and again (which, as many parents can attest, children often want to do). Not only do they get better at reading that specific text, they become better at understanding other texts as well. ![]() Kids can hear how words are pronounced, while matching them to their written forms, and hear all the aspects of expression that go into prosody.īut most research on fluency has focused on having children read a text repeatedly themselves, perhaps after hearing it modeled by an expert. One way for students to develop fluency is to listen to an expert reader while following along in the text themselves-an experience quite similar to watching a video with captions. The point should be to read for meaning, not speed. But that also happens if you read too quickly. It’s true that if you read too slowly, it interferes with comprehension. Kids are told to just reread a passage until they can do it as quickly as possible. When schools have focused on fluency, they’ve often mistaken the goal as speed. The other component is “prosody,” or the ability to do things like pause when appropriate-for example, at a comma or a period-or put emphasis on the right words. That frees up space in the mind to focus on meaning. One prerequisite for fluency is the ability to decode automatically.
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