Expression is the final component to reading fluently. When reading orally, it is important that students learn to read with appropriate intonation and emotion in order to get the most meaning out of text and essentially bring the text to life. This page includes intervention strategies you can use to develop your student's understanding of reading with expression. As you read, consider which of these interventions best align with your student's strengths and needs in the whole learner domains.
Practicing reading with expression can be interactive and fun! Because reading with expression is an oral reading skill, you can involve your entire classroom in these interventions.
Explicit Instruction
If you are intervening to support your students' ability to read with expression, you should start by explicitly teaching the skill. This sounds like:
Activity A: Say it Like a Character
Partner students according to their instructional reading levels. Give each student a different monologue, poem, or passage at their instructional level. Each student practices reading the text silently multiple times. Then the students read their passages aloud to one another. As one partner reads, the other makes inferences about the character's feelings and emotions. "Today, we will be practicing Say it Like a Character. I will put you in partners, and each of you will get a different text to read. Practice this text multiple times until you feel like you can read this text just as the character would. As you read aloud, your partner will make inferences about your character. See if your partner can guess your character's mood, tone, and personality based on how you read the passage. Make sure to switch roles after one of you has read aloud."
Activity B: Readers' Theater
Readers' Theater is another effective strategy that utilizes social interaction to increase fluency for struggling readers. In this activity, students practice and perform reading aloud from a book, play, or short story. Each student is responsible for reading the dialogue of a specific character. Before the classwide performance of a Readers' Theater play, students have multiple opportunities to reread the text as they work on bringing their character to life. Unlike rehearsing a play, in which performers memorize lines, Readers’ Theater is a celebration of reading; students stand in front of their audience and read from scripts that they hold in their hands. Costumes or props are not necessary.
Readers’ Theater can be implemented over the course of a week, with the final performance occurring on Friday. Here is a possible Readers' Theater schedule that occurs across a typical week:
Give students a Readers' Theater text and assign students to speaking roles. As a class (or in small groups), have students read their parts aloud and emphasize that students should be reading with expression. "Here is your Readers' Theater text for this week: Henny Penny! After assigning you into your character roles, we will be reading the script. When it is your turn to read, make sure that you focus on bringing your character to life—reading with appropriate emotion and expression, based on what your character is saying. Each time we practice, I want you to breathe a little more life into your character! We will perform this play on Friday."
Reader's Theater Artifact
Click here to download a list of texts that can be used, or adapted, for Readers' Theater. For free Readers' Theater scripts, click here.
Reader's Theater. (n.d.). Copyright at Relay GSE. New York, NY: Relay Graduate School of Education.?
Readers' Theater in Action
Watch this YouTube rendition of Henny Penny to see Readers' Theater in action! Notice the management structures that have been put in place to ensure that all students are on task.
Activity C: Partner Reading
During this fluency intervention, students are paired and read aloud to each other with expression. This intervention strategy was sourced from McKenna, M. (2002). Help for struggling readers: Strategies for grades 3-8. New York: Guilford Press.
In paired reading, the teacher must decide how students are to be matched up. What is the best way to choose partners? Several methods are in common use, and all of them have advocates. For example,
- Good reader-poor reader. The logic of this approach is that the abler student will support the struggling student. This assistance can take many forms.
- Just friends. Some teachers report success through allowing students to select their own partner. This method may invite social problems, of course, such as talkative pairs and solitary students.
- Leveled pairs. Students reading at about the same general level can be paired. This system prevents abler students from assisting struggling readers, but it does allow pairs to work on selections at an appropriate level of difficulty.
Variation:
Paired repeated reading: Students read the same material to each other. For example, if a stronger and weaker reader are paired, the stronger [reader] may read a paragraph to the weaker [reader first], and then the weaker [reader] reads the same paragraph back to the better reader.
Partner Reading in Action
Assign students partners, based on one of the criteria above (depending on your objective). Give them directions about how they should read the text (whether they are doing timed repeated readings, switching off turns, or reading for a specific purpose). While the class is reading, check in with partner groups. "Today you will be partner reading Henny Penny. With your partner, I want you to take turns reading sections of the book. As you read, make sure to read with emotion and expression. I'll come around the room and check in on each partner group as you are reading."
O'Connor, R., & Vadasy, P. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of reading interventions. New York: Guilford Press.
Readers' Theater Henny Penny (2011). Retrieved August 15th from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T3-20DJPs4
Think about the following scenario, which takes place after a teacher has explicitly taught a lesson about how to segment a word into sounds:
Teacher: "Read the sentence aloud, "Sam slowly crept down the stairs and said in a whisper, 'It's true! Santa's real!'"
Student: Student reads in a monotone voice, "Sam slowly crept down the stairs and said in a whisper, 'It's true! Santa's real!'"
In such a case, what might you do?
When you are planning your lessons, you should anticipate that your student will make errors throughout the activity. Here is a series of prompts that you can use to respond to errors. Keep in mind that all students are different, and some students might respond better to different types of feedback than others.
| Level of Support | Description of Scaffold | Script |
|---|---|---|
| Smallest scaffold | Try again! Allows student multiple opportunities to practice new skill. | "Let's have you try to read that sentence with expression." |
| Medium scaffold | Provide resources. Allows the student to use resources to figure out the answer (including helpful supports such as specific prompts).
|
"What might Sam be feeling in this sentence? Excitement, that's right! Can you read it again as Sam, making sure to read it with excitement?" |
| Highest scaffold | Model, Lead, Test, Retest. Model for the student using this gradual release correction procedure adopted from Carnine, D.W., Silbert, J., Kame'enui, E. J. & Tarver, S. G. (2004). Direct instruction reading (4th Ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. | 1. Teacher says the sentence with expression. 2. Teacher models: "My turn. I'll read the sentence with expression" (Signal.) Reads sentence with emphatic expression. 3. Teacher leads: "Let's do it together. Let's read the sentence with expression"(Signal.) Both read sentence with expression. (Teacher responds with the students.) 4. Teacher tests: "Your turn. Read the sentence with expression." (Signal.) Student reads sentence with expression. |
If your student struggles to meet your objective, there are various techniques that you might try to adjust the activity to your student's needs.
| Activity | Description of strategy | Script |
|---|---|---|
| Say it Like a Character and Readers' Theatre | Repeat after me. Have students practice reading with emotion by modeling and having students repeat after you. | "Let's do it together. I'll read the sentence, and then you'll read it back to me!" |
| Picture it. Students close their eyes and picture the scene like a movie so they can sense the emotions of the characters. | "Close your eyes and pretend this scene is a movie. What do you feel? How might the characters be feeling? Can you reread that sentence with expression?" | |
| Make it move. Act scenes out when necessary, to get students into character. | "Stand up! Let's try acting this scene out to think about how the characters are feeling." | |
| Partner Reading | Partner up! Have students practice reading children's books and then partner with a younger classroom so they can read the books to younger reading buddies. | "Today we'll be picking books to share with our reading buddies! Remember that its important to read them with expression because that will keep your reading buddy interested!" |