FASE reading – An approach that improves confidence & fluency
For improvements in reading confidence and fluency, try the FASE approach…
- by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway
- Authors of The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading
When discussing reading pedagogy, we are often struck by the number of veteran teachers who have come to believe that writing about and discussing texts are more valuable classroom activities than actually reading (and enjoying) those texts.
However, as Christopher Such explains, “This [children writing after reading] is a good way for the teacher to assess whether something has been understood. However, it is the reading itself and the related discussion that best advances children’s ability to read.”
He goes on to advise, “If in doubt, aim for roughly two-thirds of the lesson to comprise reading and one-third of the lesson to comprise discussion.” FASE Reading can help structure this approach.
What is the FASE reading approach?
‘FASE’ stands for the type of reading the system is designed to reinforce: fluent, attentive, social and expressive.
It’s a consistent approach to having students read aloud so that they follow along and are always ready to read themselves. It’s a critical tool to reinforce correct orthographic mapping and reveal and correct incorrect mapping.
Building fluency
In classrooms where FASE Reading is used effectively, reading is done joyfully with expression and care. At times, the teacher will model fluent and expressive reading – what we refer to as bridging. They’ll then ask students to do the same.
Bridging involves teachers reading a short segment of text in between student readers. A typical sequence of bridging might look like this:
- Arjun reads three sentences
- Teacher reads one sentence
- Maria reads four sentences
- Teacher reads two sentences
- Nikki reads six sentences, and so on…
The benefit of this method is that it moves the story along quickly and keeps the narrative thread alive. It also supports and maximises fluency and comprehension with interspersed models of teacher-quality expressive reading.
Because students don’t know who will be called on to read, they all follow along attentively in the text. This increases the amount of quality road miles they get on the page. You can see these ideas in action in US teacher Christine Torres’s fifth grade (Y6) class, below.
Consistency is key
Just as reading aloud expressively is good for students, so too is prompting them to read expressively by calling their attention to text features, dialogue tags, and vocabulary that can give them cues for appropriate expression.
Such prompting causes them to practise looking for the meaning in words and to pay attention to syntax and punctuation.
Strategies for fluency
To make oral reading consistently more fluent, try the following strategies:
Capture the mood
As accuracy and automaticity improve, some students still struggle to read with appropriate expressiveness.
You can combat this wooden reading by identifying (or asking students to infer) the kind of expression they should impart to the passage based on the general mood or on the affect of a specific character. Then ask them to apply it.
In terms of general mood, it might involve asking a student to try to capture the tension of a key scene in the way he reads it.
In terms of a specific character’s affect, a teacher might say, “Wilbur is upset, Diamond. Can you read that sentence in a way that shows that?” or “How is Wilbur feeling right now? What emotion is he feeling? Good… can you show me that in your reading?”
Asking students to capture the mood of a scene or character conveys to students that how they read a text matters. It also directly supports student comprehension.
You can help students do this by calling their attention to dialogue tags and their role as ‘stage directions.’ For example: “The passage says, ‘“I don’t want any,” Mr. Malone said sharply.’ Read that again so his words are sharp.”
You can also model the applicable tone in your own reading by intentionally bridging around a dialogue tag and asking students to apply it to the sentence they are reading.
In this example, you might say the word sharply in a sharp tone of voice that students could then imitate.
Echo reading and choral reading
Literacy experts suggest echo reading – a teacher models how to read a word, phrase, or sentence, and a student echoes it back, trying to capture the same pronunciation and expression as the teacher – as a strategy to support more fluent reading.
This is a practice that can be seamlessly incorporated into your FASE Reading. You might read a sentence and ask a student to begin their reading by echoing your sentence.
For some children, this can build their confidence in reading aloud in front of the class. You might also use echo reading to correct dysfluency.
Model with the appropriate accuracy or prosody and then ask the student to repeat in order to reinforce stronger fluency.
Similarly, you can rely on choral reading for particularly challenging, complex, or dramatic sentences. Rather than ask just one student to read, invite your whole class to copy your model.
Check the mechanics
Developing readers see punctuation but often do not grasp what it is telling them to do in terms of meaning or inflection.
Similarly, the importance of syntax – the relationship of the pieces of a sentence and its effect on meaning – is often lost on weak readers.
Making explicit references to punctuation and asking students to demonstrate their understanding of it in their oral reading is a useful way to build this important habit of attention. (“There’s a comma there. Remember to pause”; “I want you to pause and breathe whenever you see a full stop”).
For syntax, questions like asking students to identify which words told them that a sentence was a question or which words told them that two ideas were in contrast help them to improve their fluency and therefore their comprehension.
Read, then read again
Not only should we have students reread frequently to support comprehension, but we should also consider asking them to reread for fluency once they have successfully decoded and established the meaning of words and phrases in a sentence.
There’s strong evidence that repeated reading is among the most effective tools for building fluency. Even adult readers may need to read a complex passage or a sentence multiple times before it finally makes sense to them.
Asking our students to do the same is an important way to support comprehension. By consistently enforcing your expectations and giving students multiple opportunities to read and reread a text, you can encourage students to build lifelong habits that make them fluent readers who love great (and complex) books.
Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway’s book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading: Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom (£22.99, Jossey-Bass) is out now.
