Teaching English Learners: Fluency for English Learners

Now I'd like to speak to you about reading fluency for English learners. Our students need opportunities to practice reading connected text, and of course it's going to be controlled. We want to make it what we call decodable ... able to read. So I'd like to make sure that you know that English learners for fluency will need great work on that phrasing, knowing about how we phrase in the English language. They'll need help in working on building what we call prosody, that expression, that inflection, adding what we call the super segmental features of the language, the spice, adding the icing to the cake. And so as we look here, I give you an example of a passage ... "Artisans." They've been talking about the jobs that people do. And here we have the controlled text. But what I might also do is not only have them read the text, but I might do some pencil swings to help them follow along and know about that phrasing.

So let's look at the first sentence together, everyone, and let's look at how we will phrase. It'll be my turn first. "Jim makes rings for his job." Your turn. Remember those pencil swings. You can make those pencil swings. Ready? "Jim makes rings for his job." The next sentence ... "The rings are for men and women." Ready? Read. Phrase it. "The rings are for men and women. Jim rubs the rings with a cloth." Your turn to read it how I phrased it. "Jim rubs the rings with a cloth." Very good. So that's just a few examples about how we might work on that phrasing with the students. Really, these are foundational skills. Building fluency is a foundational skill, and we know that the more fluent a reader is, the more likely they're going to be able to get to comprehension. But please know, just because that English learner reads with fluency does not mean that they're automatically going to understand everything.

And so not only would I work on building that fluency, then I can ask questions related to comprehension, like who is Jim? What will you say his job is? Oh, you said he makes rings for a living. What do you know about the person who makes rings for a living? That's called a "jeweler." Remember, we practice that /er/ sound at the end. It means the one who. The one who makes jewels is a jeweler. So yeah, even though this is controlled text, we can expand and give opportunities to learn about other words. Sometimes we're like, oh, boring, controlled text. But we can add to that and expand upon that and relate to them. This is important. So building that fluency is necessary for building that comprehension. But for an English learner, I want to work on that oral language proficiency, and I want to make sure that they have the vocabulary that we can extend beyond that passage that we just read and practiced with that fluency.