NORTHCENTRAL UNIVERSITY

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Student: Daniel Alan Coffin
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EDU 7101-8

Dr. Graham

Foundations for Doctoral Study in

Education

4 - Exploring My Area of Interest

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Exploring My Area of Interest

Daniel Coffin
Northcentral University

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Exploring My Area of Interest

Emergent literacy learning, including phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency in

decoding, is generally assumed to be complete by the end of elementary school. It follows, then,
that it is generally assumed that the proper focus for middle school literacy education should be
on vocabulary acquisition and instruction in comprehension strategies, as students will already
have mastered the basics of reading. In urban schools with a predominantly low socioeconomic
status population, however, this assumption is generally unfounded. Instruction to middle school
students that lack oral reading fluency that targets only vocabulary and comprehension does little
to improve their reading skills and reinforces for increasing frustrated students that reading and
thus learning is not for them. To reach these students, it is incumbent upon the middle school
language arts teacher to determine which strategies work for elementary students that can be
employed successfully as-is and which can be modified so as to work with an older student
population. The purpose for this assignment is to review literature related to fluency
development targeting middle school students with reading difficulties.
Five Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles in My Area of Interest

EBSCOhost Education Research Complete

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Graves, A.W., Brandon, R., Duesbery, L., McIntosh, A., Pyle, N.B. (2011). The effects of tier 2
literacy instruction in sixth grade: Toward the development of a response-to-intervention
model in middle school. Learning Disability Quarterly, 34(1), 73-86.
Lingo, A. S., Slaton, D.B., Jolivette, K. Effects of corrective reading on the reading abilities and
classroom behaviors of middle school students with reading deficits and challenging
behavior. Behavioral Disorders, 31(3), 265-283.

ProQuest Education Journals

Gritter, K.A.M. (2007). Fluency is belonging: Urban middle school students and their textual
identities, Vol. 1 (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Retrieved from ProQuest
Dissertations and Theses. (Accession Order No. UMI 3282109)
Helmberger, T.R. (2014). The balanced approach to literacy instruction in middle schools.
(Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and
Theses. (Accession Order No. UMI 3680931)
SAGE Journals
Gorsuch, G. (2010). Developing reading fluency and comprehension using repeated reading:
Evidence from longitudinal student reports. Language Teaching Research, 14(1), 27-59.
doi: 10.1177/1362168809346494
Describing My Topic of Interest and Why It Is Important to Me
Oral reading fluency, along with phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary acquisition,
and reading comprehension, is one of the five components of effective reading instruction. Oral
reading fluency refers to the ability of a reader to decode accurately, with automaticity, or
without conscious effort, and with appropriate phrasing and intonation (Fountas & Pinnell,
2016). The student who cannot decipher words appropriate to grade level, who reads haltingly
and cannot recall or understand what has been read aloud, who sounds monotonous or who

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pauses in the middle of sentences and breezes through what should be pauses is said to be
disfluent.
Fluency is a core component of literacy instruction because a disfluent reader who must
spend a great deal of time and mental energy on the basic decoding of a text will likely not have
the energy remaining to then make meaning of the words decoded (Rasinski, 2003). The result is
a disaffected reader who does not comprehend but who appears to a novice teacher to be able to
read proficiently. This is especially problematic in middle school as middle school students are
assumed to already be able to read fluently and instruction shifts from an emphasis on phonics
and decoding to vocabulary and comprehension. As a result, disfluent readers fail to get the help
they need and fall farther and farther behind with every passing year. I am interested in finding
everything I can about fluency instruction and how it can be made a more regular part of
language arts instructions for the populations of struggling readers in middle schools who really
need it.
The Key Words I Used and How They Helped My Searches
I used the following key words when I started my search: fluency, development, and
middle grades. These yielded a wealth of material relevant to fluency development instruction at
the grade level I was interested in reading about.
[You may find the following library resource very helpful in completing the section.
http://library.ncu.edu/dw/index/241]
The Search Limiters I Used and How They Helped My Searches
[You may find it helpful to review the information provided at
http://library.ncu.edu/dw/index/245 to help you complete this section.]I used both the full text
and scholarly/peer-reviewed search limiters when I was conducting my search. I found them
helpful in that I knew that I would have access to the complete articles rather than just an

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abstract, and I could be reasonably sure that the articles returned to me by the search would be
suitably scholarly.
The Meaning of Peer-Reviewed and Why It Is Important to Conducting Research
[You may find it helpful to review the information provided at
http://library.ncu.edu/public_images/elrc/2015/videos/peernew/peernew.htm to help you
complete this section.]A peer-reviewed publication is one that has been examined by peer
evaluators who have determined the work to be of sufficient academic quality to publish. While
there is no guarantee per se that a peer-reviewed publication is of higher quality than a non-peerreviewed article, the fact that a work has been reviewed by other experts in the field suggests that
the author did the necessary work in supporting the conclusions drawn from their research.
What I Learned from Two of the Suggested NCU Library Resources
[The library resources being referred include the following. You only need to write about
the two of the seven listed below that were most helpful to you.
1. Finding a Research Topic. http://library.ncu.edu/dw/index/226
2. EBSCOhost Intro
http://library.ncu.edu/public_images/elrc/2013/videos/EBSCOhost/EBSCOhost.htm
3. Library Orientation Workshop http://www.viddler.com/v/6ff1764
4. ProQuest Intro
I found this introductory video helpful as I had never used the ProQuest database prior to
this assignment. I liked that this database featured not only scholarly journals but also popular
articles (which one might not cite directly, but could prompt additional avenues for research), as
well as theses and dissertations. I also appreciate that ProQuest offered a separate search limiter
for peer reviewed journals.
http://library.ncu.edu/public_images/elrc/flash/newproquest_demo/newproquest_demo.htm

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5. Scholarly Versus Peered Reviewed Journals

http://library.ncu.edu/public_images/elrc/2015/videos/peernew/peernew.htm
I found this resource interesting as I had never really thought of the definitions of
these terms as they referred to research; I was simply accustomed to thinking of scholarly as an
indicator of quality rather than a process of writing. I also hadnt been aware that EBSCOHost
doesnt differentiate between scholarly and peer reviewed journals. That will be useful
information for the future. 6. Search like an Expert
http://library.ncu.edu/public_images/elrc/2013/videos/searchlikeanexpert/searchlikeanexpert.htm
7. On Searching 101 workshop http://www.viddler.com/v/2b0ac3c6]

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References

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2016). The Fountas & Pinnell literacy continuum: a tool for
assessment, planning, and teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Rasinski, T. V. (2003). The fluent reader: oral reading strategies for building word
recognition,
fluency, and comprehension. New York, NY: Scholastic Professional Books. [Since
your references are included in the body of the assignment above you do not need to repeat them
here.]