Increasing Word Recognition with Racially Diverse Second-Grade Students Using Fluency-Oriented Reading Approaches

The author examined the effectiveness of 2 fluency-oriented reading programs on improving reading fluency for an ethnically diverse sample of second-grade students. The first approach is Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (S.A. Stahl & K. Heubach, 2005), which incorporates the repeated reading of a grade-level text over the course of an academic week. This approach to reading is scaffolded by expert readers. The other approach is Wide-Reading Instruction (M.R. Kuhn, 2005), which also utilizes scaffolding by expert readers, but 3 different grade-level texts are read repeatedly each academic week. The results indicate that both Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction and Wide-Reading Instruction are useful schemes for reading instruction with ethnically diverse second-grade students.