Accuracy

Don’t Forget to Read the Words

Kids often come away with strange interpretations of the things they read. They’ll say something about a book and I’ll think to myself, “Where in the world did they come up with that?” More often than not, they’ve picked up errant information by misreading something or not reading something at all. “Don’t forget to read the words,” I often tell them. It’s a simple notion but it’s easier said than done.

Even good readers miss words once in a while. But the crucial phrase here is “once in a while”, not frequently, and certainly not every sentence or even every paragraph as I worry some kids do. Also, when good readers stumble, they notice it. It’s like a little alarm goes off in their heads that prompts them to correct themselves, or to check their understanding to see if they need to.

I never cease to be amazed at how many reading problems can be solved simply by reading the words on the page. This may seem obvious to us, but it’s not to our kids, some of whom have spent years playing guessing games with reading. After a while, it’s as if they don’t trust the words at all.

When readers skip words, substitute words, or pronounce words incorrectly, errant information enters their brains. Starting with bad information to begin with, their understanding degrades as errors pile on top of errors. At some point, it becomes almost impossible to integrate new information into their understanding of what has come before. This is often when kids stop reading.

The hard thing about helping kids with accuracy is that it’s so hard for kids to be accurate kids when they’re still learning to read. Everyone makes mistakes—lots of them. And there’s nothing worse than having someone over your shoulder correcting every error. So I give kids two pieces of advice: slow down and re-read.

Slowing down gives kids more time to decode upcoming words. Re-reading gives kids a chance to fix their mistakes. Practiced together, these two simple strategies help kids develop the habit of reading accurately. That’s what accuracy in reading is—a habit. Nobody reads with perfect accuracy all the time. And no one needs to read with perfect accuracy to understand and enjoy what they read. But we should all try to develop the habit of reading as accurately as we can.

I don’t ask kids to read every word accurately every time. But I do ask them to practice the behaviors good readers exhibit with regard to accuracy. Specifically, I ask them to follow these guidelines:

• Try to read every word. Strictly speaking, it isn’t necessary to read every word, but one of the best ways to improve our reading is to try. This is how we add new words to our vocabulary, learn things about spelling, and stretch our decoding skills. Many kids get in the habit of letting hard words go. As texts get harder with each year that goes by, skipping and substituting increase, and readers become less accurate. None of these things is a problem on the first pass through a text. But if kids don’t make a second pass, they might miss something important. I want kids to self-correct as much as possible and then re-read as often as they can to improve their fluency and comprehension.

• Pronounce words clearly and completely. I hesitate to say “correctly” here because there are so many ways to pronounce words. But I do want kids to pronounce words clearly and completely. Some kids slip and slide around words pushing sounds together or leaving sounds out in ways that compromise their comprehension. Ends of words are often the toughest; some kids, especially second language learners, regularly leave them off. English is a highly inflected language. These inflections often come at the ends of words like the plural marker “s” in “inflections”, “ends”, and “words”, and the common past tense marker, “ed”. When readers drop markers, they often drop meaning. So I tell kids to read to the ends of the words and to read the words the way they are written.

• Practice unfamiliar words. How many times have we heard kids stumble on the name of a character over and over again? Each time it happens, they lose fluency and probably a little understanding, too. Even the most accomplished readers encounter place names, people, and subject-specific terms they’ve never seen before and don’t know how to read. When kids encounter difficult words, I want them to take a few seconds and work them out. Then I want them to re-read from the beginning of the sentence or paragraph in which those words occur so they can improve their accuracy.

• Break hard words into easy pieces. The best way to read a new word is to sound it out. And the best way to sound it out is to break it into pieces you already know how to read. I have a wide range of lessons I teach on sounding out words but none is as important as merely reminding kids to break big words into smaller pieces. For example, look at the word “smaller”. It has the word “all” inside of it, the blend “sm” at the front, and the familiar “er” suffix at the end. Teaching kids to look into words for small pieces they can read easily is the single most important sounding out strategy I teach.

• Correct words you miss if they’re important. I love it when I hear kids self-correct. Self-correction tells me that kids care about reading well, that they are willing to work hard to understand what they read, and that they are monitoring their reading closely. Not every word has to be corrected; that’s ridiculous. But we have to fix the important ones. How do we know if a word is important? We ask ourselves questions: Is it a big word? Does it appear often in the text? Can we understand the text without reading it? Can we make a good guess about what it means? Getting kids focused on logical questions makes them better readers whether they figure out the word or not.

• If you stumble on a word, go back to the beginning of the sentence. Most kids don’t miss most words. But they sure do stumble a lot. These small decoding errors aren’t problems if they only occur occasionally. But when they occur once every sentence or two, or several times in a paragraph, they disrupt fluency and compromise comprehension. In most cases, kids can easily read the problems. They’re usually just reading too fast, or too erratically, when they reach them. If they go back to the beginning of the sentence and read again, they often read flawlessly.

Reading is not an exact science; accurate decoding doesn’t guarantee accurate understanding. But it sure helps. I don’t want reading to become a game of “gotcha” or an exercise in correction. Nor do I want to push kids past the point of frustration or fatigue. At the same time, I want them to know that accuracy matters, that writers write for a reason, and that figuring that reason out begins with reading the words as accurately as we can.

Reading accurately isn’t a rule, it’s a tool. I want kids to come to their reading with the expectation of enjoying it and making sense of it, two things that depend on reading it accurately. When kids aren’t reading accurately, I want a little alarm to go off that says, “Did I miss something? Was it something important? Should I read it again? Do I need to slow down?” Assessing their accuracy while they read helps them monitor their understanding and understand more as a result.