I was listening in on a “Strategy Academy” a few weeks ago at Elliott. The topic of discussion for the session was fluency. One of the concepts that came up was that of Prosody. One of the definitions for prosody is “the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.”
I saw this video a few days later and thought it was a beautiful picture of what prosody really is.
Author and speaker Dr. Tim Rasinski is considered an authority on the topic of reading fluency. In this online article, he describes Prosody in Reading as a bridge between fluency and comprehension. We all know that fluency isn’t just about reading fast, but we’re stuck because reading rate is the closest measure we can come up with that will give us some data that we can track to indicate students are increasing this skill.
What would happen if students saw a clip like this before taking a fluency test? I believe it is possible that their words per minute rate might go down, but I wonder if comprehension would go up? I’m just thinking out loud here, but it seems that we sometimes assess fluency and comprehension separately. How much longer would it take to ask a few comprehension questions after a fluency check? I’m often struck by how literal our students are – if you want them to read fast, they’ll read fast. We have to connect these dots for them. Read with automaticity and with prosody so that you can make sense of the text. It’s a beautiful thing!