Monitoring self-monitoring

I recently read a post about recognizing, teaching, and supporting self-monitoringThe mental act of knowing when one understands what one is reading. behaviors in young readers. The post describes two readers: David, who asks questions and self corrects word errors as he reads, and Frannie, who plows through text regardless of errors that either change the meaning of the text, include nonsense words, or don’t make any sense at all. The author stresses how important it is for readers to think about what they are saying as they read. “From the very earliest reading experiences that we have with children, we need to send the message that reading is supposed to make sense and that it’s their job to be checking that their reading IS making sense.” See more at Catching Readers Before They Fall (opens in a new window).

This post resonated with me because of Becca, a first grader I just started tutoring. She’s an on-grade level reader (Rigby 7/8, Guided Reading E) but she REALLY wants to be reading chapter books like some of her classmates. Her reading speedThe rate at which a student reads. (about 60 words per minute) suggests that her fluencyFluency is the ability to read a text accurately, at a good pace, and with proper expression and comprehension. is still developing. She’s still a choppy, word-by-word reader. So, although she’s a bit slow, it’s partially because she does a great job monitoring her reading. She frequently stops and self corrects herself. She questions when her decodingThe ability to translate a word from print to speech by using your knowledge of sound–symbol (letter) correspondences. attempt results in a non-word. She listens to herself and expects what she reads to make sense. This is great, but it does slow her down.

As her tutor, I’m thrilled with her reading behavior. Moving forward, we’re going to focus on strategies to increase her fluency while maintaining the expectation that reading makes sense. Last week I introduced a re-reading chart (opens in a new window) (165 KB PDF)* from the Book Buddies manual (opens in a new window) on which Becca is using tally marks to track how many times she’s read the three books I sent her home with. This week, we’ll add new books to her rereading bag and try a timed repeated reading. I think she’ll like that strategy, although not every child does!

What do you do to help a child monitor their comprehensionMaking meaning from something that is heard (oral comprehension) or from print (reading comprehension). while developing their fluency at the same time?