The Power of Rereading

Posted by Kimberly Formus on 10/30/2015

Sometimes I will hear a student say, "But I already read this book," when they are asked to bring it home to reread.  There are several massive benefits to rereading a book.  I wanted to explain those benefits, but while I was doing some research, I stumbled upon a fellow blogger who also addressed this question.  I could not have said it better myself.  I quote a part of his article below, but if you would like to read the rest of it, please visit his blog by clicking here.

 

Happy Reading!

 

 

What if you knew of a single instructional strategy that research has shown improves decoding, fluency and reading comprehension? Would you use it? Of course, you say. And yet one of the most under used literacy strategies is such a well documented strategy: the strategy of rereading.

The research is clear on the benefits of rereading. What do we know about rereading as an instructional strategy?

 

  • Rereading helps students develop a deeper understanding of what they have read (Roskos and Newman, The Reading Teacher, April 2014).
  • Rereading helps students read with greater fluency, allowing them to give more attention to making sense of what they have read (Pikulski and Chard, The Reading Teacher, March 2005).
  • Rereading helps students develop greater accuracy in reading. When students reread, words that they may have struggled to decode on a first reading become increasingly easier to parse (Samuels, The Reading Teacher, January, 1979).

 

Researchers further agree that repeated readings should focus on short chunks of text and that the focus of the instruction should be on both fluency and comprehension (Rasinski, The Reading Teacher, May 2012). A further benefit of rereading is that the fluency that children build by rereading one passage seems to transfer to new readings later on. In other words, rereading leads to better first readings of text. 
 
With so much research to back it up, rereading should be a daily aspect of every classroom teacher's instruction. The Common Core State Standards' call for repeated reading in a "close reading" design is welcome if it encourages the use of repeated readings in all classrooms, but close reading is only one place where repeated readings can and should be used. Here are several instructional domains where repeated reading can be used to good effect.

 

 

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