Fun Fluency!

I really enjoyed this week's readings on fluency. I was particularly interested in the fourth component of fluency in Deeney's article: prosody. Deeney states, "Prosody refers to a reader's ability to read smoothly, with appropriate phrasing and expression. When I read this section of the article, I was instantly reminded of what I liked about Rasinski's article. He suggests that passages read aloud as a performance are a great tool for improving reading fluency. Certainly this type of text (a dialogue or speech) would also help achieve the prosody (expressive tone, inflection, rhythm) that Deeney finds so imperative to being fluent. I love this idea of using performance texts because I am taking Drama and Storytelling in Teaching as one of my graduate elective courses. I knew that class actions and reader's theaters were very useful for building confidence, but learning that they also promote fluency has made them so much more meaningful to me. I love that improving fluency can be fun!!

I have thought long and hard about the relationship between prosody and comprehension, and  it's like the chicken and the egg of fluency. Seriously, which one comes first?

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