[Reading-hall-of-fame] what is fluency?

[Jay Samuels]

Jan, you ended your e-mail message with the following question:  " So? From
a teacher's perspective I'd like to know what do we mean, what does research
mean by 'fluency'?

Why is fluency so important in early reading? Is it more important than
comprehension?

 

Maybe Don, these questions might be the starting point for an article.

 

Jan

 

What we mean by fluency is the heart of a heated controversy.  I feel partly
responsible in that I did not do as good a job as a should have defining
"fluency" in the National Reading Panel Final Report. The definition of
fluency is derived from automaticity theory which states a person is
automatic at a task when the person can do two difficult tasks at the same
time. If a person can do two demanding tasks simultaneously, at least one of
them is automatic. For example, driving a car through heavy traffic and
talking to a passenger seated next to you. It is the driving that is
automatic. Fluent readers can decode the text and understand it
simultaneously.  Since the definition of fluency embraces simultaneous
comprehension, your question about what is more important, fluency or
comprehension, puts me into a position of "it depends".  In the end, to me,
it is comprehension that is more important. Take the case of the struggling
beginning reader who slowly works his way through a sentence decoding the
words one by one, and then having decoded all the words retraces his steps
over the sentence only this time to grasp its meaning. As a teacher, I am
happy the student has comprehended the sentence. But, in my talks to
students, I remind them of the following, "Beyond accuracy to automaticity".
Accurate word recognition followed by comprehension is a slow process and
our goal as reading teachers is to go one step beyond and to develop fluent
readers who can do both steps at the same time. 

 

Accurate word recognition, speed of decoding, prosody in oral reading, are
all only what I call the indicators of fluency but they are not the sine qua
non of fluency. Fluency is the ability to do two things at the same time,
decode and comprehend simultaneously. Our profession is in need of tests
that measure two things at the same time, decoding and comprehension. As I
pointed out in a previous mailing DIBELS type tests encourage a regrettable
mind set in some students. They think that reading speed is all that is
important. We need to instill in students what I think of as "engagement"
the need to engage comprehension and thinking processes as we read. 

 

But wait! Haven't I painted myself into a corner. Doesn't decoding precede
meaning?  I worried about this problem until I started to get into the
research on eye movements. It is only during the eye fixation pause in
reading that there is uptake of information and processing. During the
length of a typical fixation pause in reading, about 1/3 of a second in
duration, that the two reading tasks can take place at the same time. In
fact there are several models of what happens during an eye fixation pause
that demonstrate 1/3 of a second is enough time to do the two tasks during a
single eye fixation. 

 

The ability to read with fluency to me is a bit of a miracle. For about 8
million years our species has been hard wired to process spoken language,
language by ear. But it has only been for about 7000 years that our species
has been processing language by eye, i.e., reading. Yet, with training we
can overcome some of the design flaws of the retina and read with fluency.
jay   

 

 

S. Jay Samuels

Department of Educational Psychology

College of Education

The University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN 55455

612 625 5586

fax 612 624 8241

 

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