[Reading-hall-of-fame] what is fluency?
Robert Calfee
robert.calfee at ucr.edu
Fri Nov 6 17:33:37 GMT 2009
November 7, 2009
To: NRC Listserve
From: Robert Calfee, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
Re: Fluency
Let me join with others in appreciating the exchange on this topic among colleagues, from both universities and the field of practice, especially the more extensive and reflective notes. The exchanges do indeed exemplify what might happen through the list serve platform.
The purpose of the following comment is to discuss an underlying assumption of many of the contributions and, in one note, the explicit statement that reading fluency is necessarily defined as a characteristic of oral performance. I question this presumption for a variety of reasons, both conceptual and practical. Like the inebriated person who looks for keys under the lamplight rather than where he dropped them, our understandable tendency is to define problems based on convenience rather than close analysis. Speed is easy to measure, certainly compared with qualitative. We don’t know how quickly Lincoln read the Gettysburg address, but probably neither too quick nor too slow, and speed was not the issue in any event (unlike conference presentations). For that matter, we don’t know about his prosody or syntactic phrasing either, and perhaps his delivery was actually rather dysfluent. When a high school student recites the address during President’s Day ceremonies, these criteria are much on the mind of the public speaking instructor, with an emphasis on ensuring that the delivery carry a message – not how quickly the presentation can be given. The critics of sole reliance on speed as a measure of oral reading fluency are numerous, but have done little to slow the advance of Dibels.
But let me turn to a different matter, and my main point – is it possible to define fluency from non-oral reading activities? I think the answer is clearly positive, and that exploring this arena might offer some important insights into the underlying concept. I’m sure that a qualitative investigation of David Pearson’s interaction with his Apple as he deals with email exchanges could serve as evidence that he is a fluent “reader/writer” in this domain, even though not a word may leave his lips. An eye movement study of AP students in the middle and high school years as they make their way through science textbooks searching for information about critical characteristics of the planet Jupiter would likely reveal patterns associated with greater or lesser fluency, some related to speed, but many others associated with where they search, when they speed up and when they slow down, and what they scribble along the way. Think-aloud protocols would probably enhance this investigation, but that might seem to verge on oral performance.
Fluency springs from fluid, from “flow-ness.” The movement of a stream depends on a variety of dimensions, including the volume, the topography, and so on. A fluid performance is the mark of an expert. Speed may work for Bach or Chopin, less so for Mozart, and questionably so for Rachmaninoff. The marks of fluidity/expertise can surely be found in a range of reading behaviors, from the sublime – a reading from Sandburg – to the practical – a course assistant scanning the catalogue to help a student decide among a set of statistic options.
Having suggested that oral reading performance is not the only nor necessarily the best arena for capturing the concept of fluency, let me end with the suggestion that it does pose rather interesting options. Oral reading performance of poems and plays are obvious possibilities. Readers’ theater, while it is on neither NAEP nor most other tests, provides opportunities that are engaging for students and interesting for audiences. It will be interesting, as we move to the common core and the associated assessments, to see how such opportunities are realized in the Race to the Top – or wherever.... Robert Calfee
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 09:50:18 -0000
>From: reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk (on behalf of Colin Harrison <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk>)
>Subject: RE: [Reading-hall-of-fame] what is fluency?
>To: "Jay Samuels" <samue001 at umn.edu>, <reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
>
> 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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