The essential, yet overlooked key to silent reading fluency and stamina
- Reading begins with a physical skill—moving our eyes across lines of text.
- Students who labor to read haven’t yet developed this physical skill.
- These students spend their energy trying to process words, and fall behind in vocabulary and comprehension.
- Physically efficient eye movement is essential to developing fluency and stamina.
- Only Reading Plus develops the physical domain of reading.
The dominant domain, too often misunderstood
- Research shows vocabulary is the best indicator of text complexity.
- Yet readability measures emphasize sentence length.
- Text with shorter sentences can have a low Lexile level, even when its vocabulary is more appropriate for a higher level reader.
- Reading Plus proprietary texts match students with the vocabulary level that allows them to build word knowledge and comprehension.
Student interest drives confidence, motivation, and achievement
- Research shows the critical link between higher student interest and higher performance.
- When students are able to choose topics they’re interested in, they read more closely and carefully, which strengthens skills, improves comprehension, and increases motivation.
- Reading programs that ignore student interests essentially guarantee a lower level of student engagement.
