Brittany Hammond (4) Expression in Reading

Quote: "Schreider (1991) recommends teaching students how to phrase or chunk together parts of sentences in order to read with expression. Fluent readers seem to understand how to chunk parts of sentences into meaningful units, perhaps because they've read to or have had many reading experiences themselves, but many struggling readers don't have this ability." (Tompkins, pg. 210)

Comment: I thought this quote was interesting because I have never thought about my reading as being broken up into chunks. I've always just seen myself as reading word by word. However, I also know that there's sometime that I must look ahead, because I see the punctuation and am able to correctly read the sentence. I also found that it interesting that starting with parts of a sentence, rather than the whole sentence, is good for fluency because I've learned in several classes that whole to part learning is generally more effective.

Question: In the book it said to practice the chunking and then reading the sentence over and over again. How do we make sure that this chunking process isn't just some boring repetitive process that our students start to tune out? How do we make learning expression fun and interesting?