Keeping it Fluent - Signed Reading Fluency

This session by Brent Bechtold from the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind (FSDB) is focused on delving into the seemingly murky world of reading fluency. What does fluency even mean? Come learn about the nature of fluency in this workshop and apply the research-based best practices and scoring rubrics that utilize the ASL fluency envelope and visual grammar, all of which can change your whole concept and approach to fluency instruction. Ten minutes per day of signed reading fluency practice can increase our students’ “7 Cs” when interacting with text: comfort, consistency, clarity, confidence, comprehension, chunking, and conceptual accuracy. Are our students reading passages multiple times? Do they know how to chunk text into meaningful phrases? Are they using video and rubrics to analyze their own progress over time (i.e. week-to-week, year-to-year)? Are they getting the right kind of feedback? Students need to engage in the fluency process in more than just their English Language Arts (ELA) class. This process can apply to the creation of vlogs and presentations for other content areas, such as science, history, and math. Spoken reading fluency for students who are hard of hearing, and silent reading fluency for all students, will also be addressed.