In partner reading and guided reading, it is critically important that students read silently, rather than students or the teacher reading aloud. Silent independent reading builds students’ stamina, decoding, fluency and comprehension skills. When students - especially struggling readers - read aloud, they are so focused on the performance aspect of pronouncing all the words correctly that they don’t have the mental energy left over to focus on comprehension. Reading aloud can also cause a lot of anxiety and stress for struggling readers. And finally, when a partner is following along with a disfluent reader, that partner is forced into disfluent reading habits, with their eyes tracing back over words and phrases that their partner repeats, or being forced to read more slowly than they are capable of. To support students to read silently, STARI breaks longer texts into small chunks with frequent opportunities for discussion with the teacher or with peers. These discussions allow frequent checks for understanding. Chunks of text increase in size over the course of the curriculum, allowing students to build stamina for silent reading. 

Sometimes, the teacher lesson plans prompt the teacher to read aloud to students, particularly at the beginning of a unit or when introducing a new text. This is to help students “get into” the text so they are motivated to do the silent reading. And of course students read fluency passages aloud to one another. But the vast majority of the reading of novels and nonfiction texts should take place silently. 

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