Paired reading is a research based strategy helpful to readers who lack fluency. In this intervention programme you are most likely to use paired reading during the practise stage of the lesson, when children are working together. It is important that this approach is only used, at least in this programme, when children are familiar with a text, i.e. they have already read it a number of times.

In a paired reading activity, partners read aloud to each other. Pairs can be of the same reading level or you could combine a better reader with a weaker, less fluent reader.

In general, paired reading can be used with any book, but in this programme we use paired reading on the texts that the children have just read with the adult. The partners take turns to read, reading sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph or section by section. The amount to be read might be agreed beforehand or you might ask children to develop a signal which indicates when they want their partner to take over the reading. Passing the reader over to their partner should only happen at a legitimate pause point, e.g. the end of a sentence or paragraph.

You might also want to discuss with the pairs what should happen if a reader makes a mistake or can’t read a particular word. Hopefully this won’t happen too often as the children will already have heard and read the text a number of times. But if it should happen the children should know what to do.  The best solution is probably that they go back to the start of the sentence (where the difficulty is located) and re-read the whole sentence together. Remember we want to avoid word by word reading, so it is important that any difficulty is addressed by re-read the whole sentence.

Paired reading can take many forms and you may settle quickly into an approach that the group enjoy and therefore want to repeat, alternatively you may want to try different models. You might ask the pairs to

• Read in a particular tone of voice
• Read as if one of the characters was speaking or telling the story
• Read with a particular emotion in their voice, e.g. as if frightened, angry
• Read as if they were a newsreader on television, or someone making an important announcement
• Reading as if they are sucking on a sweet, etc.

Please feel able to experiment, the aim is to increase the number of repetitions and re-readings, whilst at the same time have fun. It is however probably best to avoid asking the group to read very slowly or very quickly, as these are approaches we want to eliminate from their repertoire at this stage in their development.