achievement. Therefore, after careful diagnosis, students experiencing difficulty should be provided
whatever instruction is necessary to acquire the specific skills they need. However, even those
students requiring the most intensive instruction in the foundational skills should have the opportunity
to participate in the broader ELA/literacy curriculum, that is, instruction that focuses on meaning
making, language development, effective expression, and content knowledge.
Schools should have a plan for ensuring that students’ success with the foundational skills does not
occur at the expense of the rest of the language arts/literacy program nor the content area programs.
No single plan is recommended in this ELA/ELD Framework. However, suggestions include, but are
not limited to, the following: extended day instruction, co-teaching, brief daily small group instruction,
and individualized instruction. Most important is to avoid
the need for extensive intervention by providing excellent,
responsive instruction in the earlier grades and careful
ongoing assessment. Even in the best of school programs,
however, it is likely that some students will need additional
support. Detail about the grade-level standards is provided in
the grade-four and grade-five sections of this chapter.
Fluency
Students in the grade span continue to develop fluency, which even in the upper elementary
grades is robustly related to silent reading comprehension (Rasinski, Rikli and Johnston 2009). They
read grade-level texts with sufficient accuracy and automaticity to support comprehension. Reading
Foundational Skills Standard 4 for both grade levels indicates that students do the following:
4a. Read on-level text with purpose and understanding.
4b. Read on-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on
successive readings.
4c. Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as
necessary.
The primary purpose of fluency development is to support comprehension. Accurate and automatic
word recognition allows for mental resources to be devoted to comprehension. Thus, attention is given
to accuracy and automaticity. In addition, fluency instruction is tied to meaning making and teachers’
provide instruction in the use of context for self-correction. Rote oral reading exercises in fluency
without attention to meaning are inappropriate.
As noted in previous chapters, fluency includes accuracy,
appropriate rate (which demands automaticity), and
prosody (expression, which involves rhythm, phrasing, and
intonation). Fast accurate reading is not synonymous with
fluent reading, and although the rate at which words in a
text are read accurately is the most common measure of
fluency, rate by itself it does not indicate fluency. Prosody
is an important component of fluency, and it may be an
indicator of understanding as students convey meaning
through pitch, stress, and appropriate phrasing (Rasinski,
Rikli, and Johnston 2009).
Pronunciation differences that may be due to influences
from students’ primary language, home dialect of English,
or regional accent should not be misunderstood as difficulty
with decoding. In addition, although pronunciation is important, overemphasizing and overcorrecting
pronunciation can lead to self-consciousness and inhibit learning. Rather, teachers should check for
students’ comprehension of what they are reading, respectfully model how words are pronounced inStudents in the grade span
continue to develop fluency,
which even in the upper
elementary grades is robustly
related to silent reading
comprehension.... teachers should check
for students’ comprehension
of what they are reading,
respectfully model how words
are pronounced in standard
English, and point out differences
between pronunciations of
different dialects of English so
that students develop awareness
of these differences.
418 | Chapter 5 Grades 4 and 5