An Interview with Kathie McStravick : About Fluent Reading Trainer
Michael F. Shaughnessy
Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

1) Kathie : How does " Fluent Reading Trainer " create a better reader? 
Once readers can decode words, fluency provides the bridge between word recognition and comprehension.  Fluent Reading Trainer motivates students to read, and as they practice reading their eye-tracking, eye-teaming, and comprehension skills improve to allow them to read passages with good comprehension beyond 200 words per minute.  FLRT reduces a student's need to repeat or reread text and skip words, thus helping them to keep their place.  Without FLRT, it is difficult to measure a student's silent reading ability and it is therefore often neglected in a school setting.

2) Why do you put such an emphasis on working with students who can decode?
As you know, there is a hierarchy of skills associated with the reading process. Decoding is a very basic skill.  You must have this skill firmly embedded before you can effectively comprehend text, if not the student is spending most of his cognitive resources trying to identify words and little is left for comprehension.  FLRT tests the students decoding ability, if they cannot easily recognize words within a grade level passage, they are restricted to other activities that they can excel at, but, they miss out on fluency.  They need a program like My Reading Coach or a teacher's direct instruction to get their decoding skills to a grade appropriate level to start the program, build fluency, and comprehend.

3) Are there those who cannot decode or have difficulty decoding? 
Over the past 13 years, MindPlay has worked with struggling readers who read 2, or many more, grade levels below their current grade level.  For 3 years we operated a learning center so that we could experience struggling readers who were reading sometimes at 6 or more reading levels below their current grade level.  We found that if a student can see, hear and had an IQ of 70 or above, they could learn to decode, regardless of their label.

4) What is MindPlay's My Reading Coach? 
My Reading Coach is a mastery-based foundation program.  It teaches basic phonetic skills and rules.  In essence, it teaches students to encode and decode while it teaches them the "why" of the rules.  It also focuses on syntactic processing which comes naturally for most of us.  But some students need to be taught this skill when they read.  Once these basic skills are mastered, students move to comprehension -- first words, multiple words, a simple sentence, a complex sentence, a paragraph, then a short story (from 50 – 250 words).

5) What do you mean by "Silent Reading Skills?" 
When I speak of silent reading skills I'm referring to the ability to read silently with ease and sustained attention at an adequate speed with sufficient understanding.

6) I note that you are attempting to "improve automaticity of high frequency words embedded in stories" I recall Robert Sternberg talking about automaticity back in the 80's. 
Sternberg often talked about our ability to process many tasks at the same time, some in the background and some in the active space.  His research matches what we have observed in students learning to read and extending their skills to fluency and comprehension.
  He cites how speed or automaticity of accessing word meanings is a factor in reading comprehension.  Step 1: decoding (My Reading Coach), Step 2: gaining access to word meaning (mental dictionary - My Reading Coach: Expert Sheets and supplemental lessons),and, Step 3: selecting the correct meaning to enable comprehension (FLRT).

7) Are you using his theory and work or some other approach? 
When it comes to automaticity – he nailed it, we have just developed mastery systems to ensure that students acquire the needed skills get to automaticity and reduce their cognitive workload.

8) How can this program be used with English Language Learners?
Michael, that's a good question.  First we need to define the level of function the ELL student is operating at.  1) Can they speak English? 2) Can they read in English? 3) Can they read in their native language? 4) Do they have a basic vocabulary in English? 5) Can they comprehend what they read even if not on grade level?  If they can do each of the above, then they are ready for FLRT.  If not, My Reading Coach is a better solution.

9) I understand that this program has an internal monitoring program. How does this work and what feedback do teachers and parents get? 
Absolutely.  FLRT fits under our Universal Administrative and Reporting System (U-ARC).  This software manages student, class, school, and district information.  There is an extensive set of reports associated with FLRT including Goal, Progress against Goal, Currently Assigned Activities, Progress to Date, Attendance, Improvement, and many more.  Reports are in graph and data formats.  Teachers and parents can view the reports or print them. Schools can print individual student reports into a PDF and email reports to a parent.

10) What is this RAPS program and how does it fit in with Fluent Reading Trainer? 
Another good question! Reading Analysis and Reporting System is the heart of many of our programs.  It is a diagnostic program that currently tells us who is a good candidate for either My Reading Coach or Fluent Reading Trainer.  It will identify students with decoding issues and exactly which area of 7 identified areas the student needs help.  For instance, a student may have difficulty with consonant blends, short vowels, or word structure to name a few.  The RAPS analysis is embedded into My Reading Coach Platinum to ensure that students only take lessons they really need.

11) Some of your reading passages are quite short. How do kids make the jump from these short paragraphs to say, the Harry Potter books (which are quite thick and vocabulary rich)? 
My Reading Coach has passages from 50 – 250 words, because for the most part struggling students get frustrated at stories beyond that level until Fluency is developed.  FLRT stories range from 50 – 1500 words.  Students begin with what is appropriate to their reading rate and then the program selects passages of greater lengths as they improve.  The idea is that a student should easily be able to read 3 or more passages and answer the questions in a 40-minute block.  It should not take students more than 6 minutes to read any passage. 

12) Do you have a web site where reading teachers and parents can get more information? 
Absolutely, www.myreadingcoach.co.uk 

Published November 27, 2007