Emma – Level A Case 3
Summarize the two strategies and explain how they will help Emma reach her goal.
Peer Tutoring
Peer tutoring is a flexible, peer-mediated strategy that involves students helping each other out in
the classroom setting. Typically, a higher performing student is paired with a lower performing
student to review critical academic concepts. Peer tutoring involves children working together in
a structured manner to practice teacher selected skills. The formats for peer tutoring include
cross-age tutoring and class-wide peer tutoring. The former is typically seen in private tutoring,
due to pairing two students of different age groups. The latter, known as class-wide peer tutoring,
involves dividing the entire class into groups of two to five students with differing ability levels.
Students then act as tutors, tutees, or both tutors and tutees. CWPT involves highly structured
procedures, competitive teams, and posting of scores. Both are great approaches to peer tutoring
and benefit the students in different ways. Peer tutoring is highly effective with children that
have different instructional levels. It provides increased focused instructional time, and
opportunities to practice skills. Both of which are linked to improvements in reading skills. The
student then receives feedback and encouragement from their peers. Ultimately, peer tutoring
increases positive social interactions; thus, an improvement in social and behavioral skills occurs
within the students.
The case study stresses Emma’s shy demeanor and social issues. Typically, when she is asked to
read aloud in class, Emma recedes into herself, and does not actively engage in the readings. Her
low self-esteem is shown to highly affect her fluency and reading skills. Emma would greatly
benefit from peer tutoring primarily because the learning would take place among her peers.
Oftentimes, children are intimidated of reading for adults, especially teachers, because they fear
judgement or anger. It is far easier to pair two students up and have the higher performing
student tutor Emma. Using peer tutoring, Emma will gain the confidence necessary to read
stories as well as develop her fluency.
Repeated Readings
Repeated readings is a strategy that requires students to read and re-read short passages of about
50-200 words. The goal of repeated reading would be to re-read the passage until they reach an
appropriate level of fluency and comprehension (Repeated Reading, 2014). This method helps
students, with little to no experience in reading fluently, gain the confidence and speed to process
words automatically as they read. Other benefits of repeated reading include helping all readers
with fact recall and identifying the main idea in a text. Due to these two primary benefits, the
student will enhance their comprehension skills and insight, which will lead to faster reading and
increased word recognition accuracy. Repeated reading could even be used as a study strategy.
Its ultimate goal is to ensure that the student can read fluently and understand what they have
read.
The case study elaborates Emma’s mild struggles with fluency. Due to her lack of confidence
and shyness when reading aloud, one infers that she feels some kind of pressure in reading
correctly, and is letting that affect her fluency. Implementing repeated reading would definitely
help Emma reach her reading goal. Emma will be expected to sound out the words, as well as
reflect on what she has read. By reading a passage, getting further, and further each time,
Emma’s reading gets to be faster and better put together because of the practice and error
correction each round. Utilizing only passages gone over in class, Emma will also familiarize
herself with the lesson, and become more confident in her skills.
Select a short passage from a fifth-grade basal series* and explain how you would use it to
help Emma improve her fluency.
The passage chosen from a fifth grade basal series is titled Invisible Isabella. The story revolves
around a girl who manages to disappear into thin air whenever she feels threatened or scared.
While only a page and a half long, the story contains many high frequency words such as
“gargoyles” and “shivered”. Reading multisyllabic words such as these will help develop her
fluency. It will also enhance her vocabulary, and allow her to learn certain words that she may
find herself using later in her academic career. Aside from that, the story will also resonate with
Emma by appealing to her demeanor and shy nature. Emma will see a part of herself in the story,
and possibly gain some confidence.
Because the two strategies introduced in the case study are incredibly conducive to developing
fluency, I would find a way to integrate both using “Invisible Isabella”. Using this reading
passage, I would do a paired repeated reading session. Emma would be paired with a student of
similar reading ability. The two students will take turns reading and listening to their partners
read “Invisible Isabella”. Each student would read the passage three times. The listener can assist
with pronunciation and meaning. The students will then fill out a short evaluation form on their
partner’s reading. Not only would this make Emma more comfortable, but it will also give her
the confidence to read aloud to her peers. Emma and her partner will also be expected to fill out
the questions at the end of the passage to reinforce what she has read.
