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

[Colin Harrison]

Thanks to everyone for their posts on fluency. I agree with Jay- we need
to consider word recognition and comprehension processes together, and
to reflect more carefully on precisely what is happening when what we
call 'fluent reading' is taking place. 

 

The data from eye-movement research are notoriously challenging to
interpret, but we know two things for sure: saccades during fluent
reading last about a quarter of a second, and the distance between one
fixation and the next is not fixed- it is decided saccade by saccade by
the brain, on the basis of on-line monitoring of the data stream and
information available in the parafovea of vision about where next it
would be most productive to alight. What this means is that word
recognition is not just 'automatic' (we might equally say 'unattended',
ie without any conscious deployment of reflective attention of the sort
that is needed in construing a totally unfamiliar word), it is
incredibly rapid. Word recognition takes place in perhaps a twentieth of
a second- 50 milliseconds, and this leaves a whole 200 milliseconds for
the brain to pass information on pronunciation to the voice box (and of
course not only does nearly everyone make tiny muscle movements in the
voice box in silent reading, it's very difficult to stop them doing so-
but the key insight is that vocalisation follows, rather than precedes,
word recognition), and for 'comprehension'. 

 

The 'comprehension' processes that take place in this fifth of a second
have to include proximal (word-level) semantic checks on word meaning
and morphology,  local grammatical coherence checks, distal
(phrase-level) semantic checks, attention to building up a
representation of the meaning of the text at paragraph or whole text
level, and integration with other information sources, which these days
might include one's own world knowledge, illustrations, graphics,
tables, stored models of text structure (if you're old enough to have
been brought up as a practising member of a sect based in a compound
somewhere in Illinois allied to the Church of Schema Theory), plus
alignment of incoming data with the goals or purposes of that particular
act of reading (skimming, summarizing, critiquing, etc.).

 

Many years ago, when I was doing research into children's understanding
of school texts, I did a little experiment. I took a section from a
physics text book that explained (with a diagram) how a jet engine
worked, together with a piece of writing from a good high school student
in which she had attempted to explain in her own words how a jet engine
worked, and asked teachers 'Do you think this student has understood
this passage'?  The results were fascinating. Most non-specialists felt
that the girl had done an excellent job, but science teachers were split
50-50 on whether or not she had understood the text. So I went to a
professor in the Engineering Department of the University, and asked him
his opinion. He said 'Not only does this girl not understand how a jet
engine works, the author of the textbook doesn't understand how a jet
engine works!' To me, this experience highlights both the fascinating
challenge and the frustratingly impossibility of pinning down what we
mean by 'comprehension'. Clearly the teachers who said 'yes' to my
question were giving credit for the girl's making a reasonably
intelligent attempt at a summary that was essentially a linguistic
transformation (including some semantic superordinates and synonyms)
that we normally take as evidence of 'comprehension'. Those who said
'no' were the people who felt that comprehension went deeper than this,
and that they lacked evidence of a deeper processing of the concepts of
compression, thrust, flow and reaction, etc. I am making the point that
'comprehension' of science texts is no simpler to understand and monitor
than comprehension of, say, Anna Karenina.

 

Coming back to the question: no, fluency is not more important than
comprehension. For me, fluency in oral reading is reading that, by its
accuracy, prosody and intonation offers suggestive evidence that the
reader is comprehending the text. One might even go further and say that
fluent reading is oral reading that can help a poorer reader to
comprehend a text (my experience is that poor readers are not helped by
crude text-to-speech software; they can't understand it; but they are
helped by reading while listening to fluently read text).  

 

Colin Harrison

 

 

________________________________

From: reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf
Of Jay Samuels
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 2:46 PM
To: reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] what is fluency?

 

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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