[Reading-hall-of-fame] what is fluency?
Gay Pinnell
gaysu at pinnelleducation.com
Fri Nov 6 21:35:41 GMT 2009
Thanks everyone for the wonderful discussion. We have been assessing
(in oral reading) along several dimensions of fluency--pausing,
phrasing, intonation, word stress, rate ( not by WPM but by a
qualitative judgment of "not too fast and not too slow) along with an
additional assessment of the reader's integration of these
dimensions. Then we provide explicit instruction in these dimensions
including demonstration and prompting. It makes a big difference. Of
course this instruction takes place on text that is at independent or
instructional level for the student and that assumes high accuracy and
satisfactory comprehension. So fast visual processing of print is
necessary but not sufficient for fluency ( as defined here). The
reader's goal is to reflect the deeper meaning of the text with the
voice . We find reader's theater to be engaging and helpful but we
also work in small group reading instruction coupled with specific
instruction to help students use word parts efficiently (in
combination with language syntax and meaning). It seems that smooth
processing depends on all these cognitive actions and the physical
actions of the eyes working together with the eyes so that the reader
can be immersed in the meaning of the story or informational text.
What are some morr great readings or studies that explore the
underlying role of fast processing!
We are finding that when students try ONLY to improve WPM, especially
if it is on the report card, they mumble over words, skip key and
important words and just generally make a mess of it but may actually
score high.
We also find that when you have readers using phrasing, rate in
general improves.
Several years ago I (with others--Karen you may want to comment) did
a study for NAEP that found reliable qualitative evaluation of fluency
was highly correlated with comprehension.
Now FAST is the goal and I am not so sure about the relatio ship to
comprehension. What do you have if you skip every hard word? What
can be done to turn this situation around?
GSP
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 6, 2009, at 5:07 AM, "Colin Harrison" <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk
> wrote:
> 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 tota
> lly 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 o
> n pronunciation to the voice box (and of course not only does nearly
> everyone make tiny muscle movements in the voice box in silent read
> ing, 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 represen
> tation of the meaning of the text at paragraph or whole text level,
> and integration with other information sources, which these days mig
> ht include one’s own world knowledge, illustrations, graphics, table
> s, stored models of text structure (if you’re old enough to have bee
> n brought up as a practising member of a sect based in a compound so
> mewhere in Illinois allied to the Church of Schema Theory), plus ali
> gnment of incoming data with the goals or purposes of that particula
> r act of reading (skimming, summarizing, critiquing, etc.).
>
>
>
> Many years ago, when I was doing research into children’s understand
> ing of school texts, I did a little experiment. I took a section fro
> m a physics text book that explained (with a diagram) how a jet engi
> ne 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 ha
> s understood this passage’? The results were fascinating. Most non-
> specialists felt that the girl had done an excellent job, but scienc
> e 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 textbo
> ok doesn’t understand how a jet engine works!’ To me, this
> experience highlights both the fascinating challenge and the frustra
> tingly 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 intel
> ligent attempt at a summary that was essentially a linguistic transf
> ormation (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 co
> ncepts of compression, thrust, flow and reaction, etc. I am making t
> he 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 i
> t; but they are helped by reading while listening to fluently read t
> ext).
>
>
>
> 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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