Success for Students With Diverse Reading Abilities Through the Use of Supplemental Reading Curriculum

This article discusses the use of a reading curriculum designed to incorporate all of the proven practice components of reading as suggested in the United States National Reading Panel report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). These practices are phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. The supplemental reading curriculum is a developmental collection of short stories written for the purpose of giving students the opportunity to practice and improve reading fluency, which is defined as the combination of reading rate, accuracy, and prosody. The purpose of the study described here was to analyze the effect of the supplemental reading curriculum in order to determine its effectiveness as a component of the complete reading program. The analysis focused on reading rate and accuracy, components of fluency that correlate with improvement in reading comprehension, and the ultimate objective of reading.