Most theoretical fibre suspension models currently used for predicting the flow-induced evolution of microstructure in the processing of reinforced thermoplastics are based on the Jeffery model of dilute suspensions in a Newtonian suspending fluid or phenomenological adaptations of it that account for fibre-fibre interactions. The viscoelastic behavior typical of thermoplastics is not taken into account by these models even though experimental results evidence radically different kinematics depending on whether the fluid is Newtonian or not. Even though few counterparts of the Jeffery theory exist for second-order fluids, they have been rarely considered and, to our knowledge, never taken into account for macroscopic scale modeling. In this work, we address the modeling of short fibre suspensions in rheologically slow flows of viscoelastic fluids throughout the different description scales, from microscopic to macroscopic. We propose a simplified modeling framework based on the concept of effective velocity gradient acting on the fibre. This is derived from the asymptotic analysis of the flow around the fibre at small Weissenberg numbers and allows the straightforward extension to viscoelastic fluids of the standard Folgar & Tucker model widely used in industrial simulation software.