Fluency

Breaking the Code, Developing Reflexes and Fluency

At one end are children who typically are still at the pre-school level or the kindergarten level, and breaking the code for these children means understanding the underlying principle that letters represent sounds. They may not know all the letters, they may not know all the sounds, and they certainly may not know all the links between letters and sounds, but the idea that these scribbles on a page are symbols that represent sounds is the beginning of breaking the code.

At the other end of breaking the code the whole process flows extremely fluently. The letters are over learned, the sounds are over learned, the connections between them are over learned and automatic, and it’s no longer necessary to think about it.

Fluency and the Basic-Proficiency Spectrum

Proficient, Fluent Reading Doesn't Require Conscious Processing

Children who perform at the proficient level not only can understand the words that they’re reading and the paragraphs that they’re reading, in the sense of bringing to bear information from their own experience, other classes, reading, home and background to bear on what they’re reading; but they also read fluently. That means they’ve broken the code; they can turn letters into sounds at a level that doesn’t really require conscious processing anymore.

It’s like the child who has learned to ride a bicycle and really has learned to ride it. That child is not thinking about where her feet are on the pedals and how quickly she has to turn the pedals around and whether her hands are on the brake or not. That part of the process has been over learned and the child doesn’t even have to think about it anymore, and can now think about where the bicycle is going and why the trip is going to be taken and whether she should be going fast or slowly.

Children who have really broken the code have moved to fluency. The whole process of dealing with the code is now occupying a different section of the brain; it doesn’t require a lot of thought and allows them to go on and think about what they are exposed to, what they are reading, what’s written on the page and what it really means.

Left Side of the Brain - The Word Forming Area Key to Fluency

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: To us, when we think of how children learn to read, children first, you know, obviously learn the letters and the sounds. Then they learn strategies to sound out words. When they’re doing that, that’s still laborious. It demands attention.

After they’ve read a word correctly a number of times — no one knows exactly how many times, some people think four or six, and it probably varies for each child — but have read a word over and over again correctly — and that’s the key, correctly — then that the word becomes automatic, and they just need to look at it and they automatically recognize it. That’s where that occipital temporal region becomes involved. So it’s really that occipital temporal region that is critical because it’s that same ventral stream on the left side of the brain. So this particular area on the left side of the brain, the word forming area, is the area that we and others believe serves the expertise in reading. That’s very, very important because when you can read a word fluently it’s read automatically. That means you don’t have to devote conscious attention to it. And unless you can read words fluently, you’re not going to enjoy reading.

It’s hard work. That why I think so many people misunderstand what a struggling reader is all about. It’s not that they can’t read. That may happen, but it’s very rare. But it’s how much effort they have to put into it.

David Boulton: The bandwidth they’re consuming to do the processing to get to that level of fluency that can allow them to run.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That’s right.

Hesitation Impedes Fluency

Disfluency and Public Shame

Fluency and the Matthew Effect

Radiant Effects of Disfluent Reading

One of the experiences that can bring home what we’re talking about here is to look at a child who’s struggling with reading. Try to read a passage in a book. Reading that for a fluent reader would involve sixty or seventy words a minute. I have video tapes back from my prior life as a researcher where we have first graders who are taking seven or eight minutes to get through a short, age appropriate paragraph. By the time they get to end of that paragraph, struggling to sound out the words, with parents help, I can’t remember what the child said ten minutes ago, much less the child who is struggling with all the consequences of reading failure.

It’s like any skill, once you’ve acquired it it seems easy, it seems natural. I think parents, teachers and children don’t appreciate how extraordinarily difficult this is. And how if the bar of expectations for what you’re supposed to be doing is way in advance of what you are actually able to do, then theemotional consequences, the frustration feeds into the process.So, you have an explosive mixture of delays in the development of phonologically related skills, delays in the development of semantic knowledge and background knowledge and a contrast between what everybody knows you’re supposed to be able to do and what you are actually able to do. That interferes with the process, as well as a performance problem that often leaves children showing that they’re able to do less than they’re actually able to do because the frustration and emotions, the demands of the task interfere with the child expressing what she’s actually able to do if she relaxed and wasn’t concerned about performance.

Vocabulary and Fluency

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: From the very beginning we have to teach a whole variety of things to kids. In fact, in terms of what I tell teachers or how I organize things in schools that I work in, is that there really are four big things that have to be addressed with literacy instruction.

One of them has to do with words. Initially, you’re talking word recognition. You’re talking all those phonics skills and letters and stuff like that. Eventually, that goes away and it becomes about working with word meanings, working with vocabulary, building up kids’ knowledge of academic language. That’s one piece if it.

The second piece of it is what’s come to be called fluency, which really means you cannot just recognize words, but you must string those words together so that if you read a text aloud it would sound like language. The words would be grouped properly. You would have the emphasis on the right ones.

David Boulton: And it would be flowing at a pace that is consistent with our attention, our natural flow of listening.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: You’ve got it, exactly. 

Connections Between Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary & Comprehension

Fluency and the DIBELS Assessment

Code Processing, Fluency and Comprehension

Success in School Depends on Fluent Reading

Slow Readers Need More Time

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: A very important thing is children grow up to be adolescents and young adults, and whatever they want to aspire to be, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a writer, they often have to take a series of tests. One of the things we know is that because children who struggle to read don’t develop that left word forming area that’s responsible for being able to read more fluently, they read very slowly and require extra time.

That becomes a really important thing because so many children who’ve worked so hard all their lives, they come to the point where they need to take an SAT or an ALSED Law School Admissions Test or a GRE, and they require extra time if they’re going to be able to show what they know. There’s been a very strong – it’s not a movement, I don’t know the right word – but these children are more and more being denied the extra time that they require.

David Boulton: There’s this general failure in the way that we think about assessment to actually meet the kids in some way that reflects what their situation is.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz: That’s right, not to feel that they’re somehow getting away with something or weak. If somebody needs glasses, you wouldn’t question it, or if a diabetic needs insulin, in the same we know that children or young adults and adults who have reading problems require extra time. For me, as a physician and as a scientist, one of the most exciting things has been that we’ve been able to now demonstrate that in children who are dyslexic, they don’t develop that word forming area but they do develop compensatory regions on the right side of the brain and also in the front that allow them to read. But not automatically so that they can become highly accurate readers, but by the investment of an extraordinary amount of time and energy. They can get there, but their route is much slower and more inefficient.

Disfluent Reading Costs Seven or Eight Times as Much to Remediate

Children's Futures all but Fated by Reading

Children who are failing at reading at the end of the first grade are extremely likely to be failing at reading at the end of fourth grade. And failure in reading strongly predicts failure in all other academic subjects. So, a child who is not breaking the code well, who has not figured it out, who is falling behind, is a child whose academic life course is at risk and because of that whose life is at risk because the economic opportunities of life.

Again, at the lower end of the dimension are ones that have profound effects on not only obvious things: quality of life dimensions, how much money one earns, or the neighborhood one lives in, but actually have effects on longevity, on how long you will live.

So, reading again, is absolutely fundamental. It’s almost trite to say that. But in our society, as it is structured, the inability to be fluent is to consign children to failure in school and to consign adults to the lowest strata of job and life opportunities.

Fluent Reading is Not a Model of How to Teach Reading

Dr. Keith Stanovich: I think your point about it really takes an introspective leap to get into the mind of the learner, I think that’s the important point. It certainly resonates with a lot of problems the reading field has had by using the introspections of highly practiced people.

David Boulton: Yes. That was one of the pitfalls of the whole language argument, right?

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Exactly.

David Boulton: How a great reader reads is not a model of how to teach those who don’t know how to read.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: It’s not a model of how to teach someone reading. Now we’re going back to the beginning of the interview because that was exactly Frank Smith’s conjecture in understanding reading in that 1971 book; that a view into the processing mechanisms of the fluent reader was a perfect view into the world of the learner and how you should deal with the learner. And that turned out to be exactly wrong. 

Not Having Reading Fluency is Missing Out

To be able to be lost in a book, to enjoy that activity, to be able to engage in the empathy that comes out of literature and fiction is an experience that those of us who have been involved in it think of as one of the core aspects of living well. Individuals who are prevented from having that sort of experience because of lack of reading skills or reading fluency, I think, are missing out on a significant portion of what it means to enjoy life.