Oral Reading Dinosaurs
By Maryann Manning

Have you seen Fastaraptor, Correctaratops Rex and Toomucharasaurus skulking around your school? In a perfect reading world, sightings of these oral reading dinosaurs would be few and far between. But lately I've seen them jumping in and out of classrooms, gnashing their ugly teeth. I also have to admit that they were present in my classroom in my early years of teaching, because I followed my intuition and many of my practices were uninformed.

Fastaraptor
Sightings of this dinosaur have increased so much in recent years that it has been moved off of the extinct and endangered species list. The "read as fast as you can possibly read" mentality permeates some classroom environments. When I see this dinosaur, I want to chase it and scream at the top of my lungs, "Reading is about meaning and not a race," to scare Fastaraptor away. But just you try reasoning with a dinosaur...

Some may think that I'm opposed to readers being fluent when they read, but I'm not. Although I like to listen to fluent oral reading, I'm very concerned that some students sound like repeater guns, but have no comprehension of what they are reading. I know parents who have purchased stopwatches so that they can time their child's oral reading during the evenings and weekends. This practice is almost certain to take time away from pleasurable family time, because oral reading has been turned into an activity of Olympic proportions.

Additionally, the emphasis on speed causes students to not do many things that good readers must do. In order to be thoughtful and access prior knowledge about the topic of the text, a reader needs to take time to think. If we want students to make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections, readers need to pause to reflect while reading. We want our students to know that good readers adjust speed and use different rates when they are reading a variety of texts.

The focus on speed has become such an epidemic that some readers I've encountered recently just skip words that they don't know. When I question the students about the number of omissions, they tell me that stopping to figure out the word takes time and reduces their words per minute. I want readers to monitor for meaning, which means having self-correction and repetition miscues that indicate that the student is comprehending.

There are many oral reading strategies we can use that encourage fluency but keep meaning intact. Independent reading, choral reading and readers' theater are all powerful ways to continue to use to support the development of fluency. Some of our students just need to be encouraged to slow down their rate so that they can concentrate on the meaning of what is being read.

Correctaratops Rex
There was a time when I actually believed that a reader should say every word in the text. I saw it as my duty to correct any word that the student mispronounced. I had anointed myself the official word corrector in the classroom. I even had deputized the other students to act as correctors when they heard a reader deviate from the text. I was armed with my trusty three little words, "Sound it out!" and I used the words often. That was before I learned about miscue analysis and began listening to the types of miscues that students were making.

When miscue analysis entered my life, I began listening to myself and noticed that I made miscues when I read aloud to my students. I found that if I miscued early in a sentence, I often changed the forms of the rest of the words in the sentence to make sense. I noticed that I sometimes substituted one word that made sense for another word, that I sometimes omitted a word and that if I was not understanding the text, I repeated a few words that I'd already read.

I was a good reader but I found that I could identify all the different types of miscues in my own oral reading. I began to really understand the reading process, and my goal of having my students be perfect oral readers changed. I wanted my students to monitor meaning as they were reading and to make miscues that didn't change the author's meaning.

I began teaching all of my students about retrospective miscue analysis, and they began to listen to miscues to determine if they changed meaning. Instead of correcting each other if a specific word was not read, they began to listen for miscues that did or didn't change meaning. They knew that saying, "red" for "magenta" or "puppy" for "beagle" wasn't a terrible infraction but rather a miscue in which no meaning was lost. They also knew that saying "furrow" for "furor" changed meaning, and they needed to figure out how to pronounce the author's word.

In short, when I learned about miscue analysis and taught my students about retrospective miscue analysis, that was the end of Correctaratops Rex in my teaching. Whenever a miscue was uttered, I didn't think, "That was wrong," but rather, "Was the meaning changed?"

Toomucharasaurus
There was a time when I thought I needed to hear my students read aloud every day. In addition to reading aloud to me, I had them read aloud to each other. When I heard a college professor say, "There are only two reasons for students to read aloud," I began to evaluate my thinking about oral reading. The two reasons given were 1) for assessment of the reading process, and 2) to share specific parts of what is being read with others. I began to realize that I wanted my students to be excellent independent readers and all my emphasis on oral reading was negatively impacting my goal.

I made excuses for all the oral reading by saying that my students really enjoyed reading aloud to each other and that they would request time to read aloud. Because students found reading aloud pleasurable, I allowed many students to take turns practicing reading aloud in pairs and triads. My attitude was since they enjoyed it, it must be a good thing. Now I know that I should have had a tiny bit of reading aloud and that the majority of the time should have been spent reading independently.

Something that I've always done as a teacher that was right was the oral reading of lots of good literature. But I should have been more judicious about the amount of time my students read aloud.

How much oral reading do you have in your classroom? Think about the amount of oral reading and purpose in relationship to your beliefs about how to develop readers who are focused on meaning. You will then know if my oral reading dinosaurs are in your classroom.

Maryann Manning is on the faculty of the School of Education, the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

February, 2007, Vol.37, No.5