Making Repeated Readings Real

Tim Rasinski is a renowned professor of literacy education whose research on reading fluency and word study has made him a literacy hero to many. Below, he shares his thoughts on repeated readings. 

In my previous blog, I explored the importance of repeated reading as an approach to improving students’ reading and overall reading proficiency. I pointed out that when students read a text several times, they not only demonstrate improvement in their reading of the current text but also on new texts never before read.  

While the results of research on repeated reading are compelling, the more practical question is how can teachers make repeated reading an integral part of their classroom instruction. In many classrooms, well-meaning teachers have children read a text multiple times for the purpose of increasing their reading speed. This to me does not seem a very authentic purpose for reading a text multiple times. When in real life do people engage in multiple readings of the same text for the purpose of reading it faster?