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  • Essay / RAVE-O Town: Comprehensive Online Network for Dyslexics

    Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary Building, Spelling, also known as RAVE-O, is an experimental, fluency-based approach to intervention reading. This program was designed to accompany a phonological analysis program. It was created to respond to the growing importance and need for fluidity and automaticity in intervention. RAVE-O addresses several sources of disfluency such as fluency, word attack, comprehension, word identification, and automaticity (such as phonology, spelling, semantics, and lexical skills) (Wolf, Miller and Donnelly, 2000). The goal of RAVE-O is to facilitate the development of rapid recognition of orthographic forms and to change children's attitudes toward language and/or reading. RAVE-O functions as a small group reading intervention program. The instructions for each unit have been designed to be concise, explicit, coherent and easy to follow. Instruction was designed to progress and explicitly connect all aspects of a word as it is encountered. It offers “interactive, multi-sensory activities and imaginative strategies that improve students’ abilities to decode, read fluently, understand, remember and enjoy what they read” (Wolf, 2011). RAVE-O consists of 16 units, with three to six lessons per unit. Every day, in every unit, RAVE-O's multisensory activities and Minute Stories aim to strengthen the attention and memory of struggling readers. Overall progress within a unit moves from accuracy to fluency to fluent understanding. The target audience for RAVE-O is students in grades 2 to 5 who have “decoding difficulties related to phoneme awareness, fluency deficits and/or rapid naming deficits, in the category “ at risk” (as measured by DIBELS®, DIBELS® Next, or by standardized measures of word attack and word identification), are struggling readers who are also learning English and have been identified for the level 2 or level 3