[Reading-hall-of-fame] Dissolving fluency into useful parts

[David Olson]

Dear Jay et al:

I think Jay's comment is helpful in dissolving the notion of "fluency"
into components that, unlike fluency, are relevant to reading, namely,
"decoding and comprehending at the same time".  But distinguishing
decoding and comprehension is somewhat puzzling to me and perhaps requires
that we "caliberate our instruments", i.e., adopt a common vocabulary. 
Decoding to me is recognizing a word and that implies that we understand
the word; we know it is a word we know.  But that sounds a lot like
comprehension.  In fact, understanding and comprehending are synonyms. 
But if we allow "comprehension" to mean something like sentence or text
comprehension, then Jay can have his two factors at the same time,
understanding the words and linking the word into a comprehensible text. 
I would agree that this is critical to competent reading.  Can you, Jay,
live with that?

I would hope, thereby, that we have eliminated the necessity for talking
about "fluency" except in Arthur  Appleee's sense of "fluency in English",
said informally of a second language learner.  Fluency as a direct
indication of reading competence is dangerous as many have implied in that
it legitimizes the use of such tests as the Dibels.  The danger of Dibels
is that if it is accepted as a legitimate measure of reading, pedagogical
efforts will be directed to performing well on such tests at the expense
of actual reading.  So would it not be better to just say that fluency is
an oversimplified and misleading indication of reading competence?

David Olson

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/private/reading-hall-of-fame/attachments/20091119/4710c24d/attachment.html