The Importance of Fluency in Reading

by Jack Farrell

Trustee, Mammoth Unified School District

The main stumbling block for many emerging young readers is their struggle to become automatic at the task. Reading specialists term this automaticity, but I prefer to call it fluency when referring to reading, an easier term to grasp. Almost any routine task can be made automatic if performed repeatedly, such as playing a musical instrument or performing a specific athletic move. Here is a real-world example: have you ever driven to the market or post office and have no recollection of the drive there? It may be shocking, but you actually drove there fairly safely. You have so automatized the task of driving a car, especially along well-traveled routes, that you can safely free a part of your brain for preferred activities, like making plans or day-dreaming. And that is one of the great benefits of making a task automatic; it frees a part of the conscious mind to perform other tasks. Court reporters are the official stenographers of the judicial system, the primary source of all official transcripts. Surely they can think of other things while the words spoken in court pass directly through their fingers to the steno machine. And many have shared that that is exactly what happens!

How long does it take to become automatic at any task? Malcolm Gladwell, in his latest book “The Outliers,” asserts that it takes 10,000 hours to become a virtuoso. For violinists, that is 6 to 8 hours of practice a day for years on end. Few readers have that kind of time. At even an hour a day, that’s 27 years of reading. Becoming a virtuoso is more a life-long goal. And it is true: the older you are, the more you’ve read, the better reader you are.

Fluency in reading can actually be achieved rather quickly in school, usually by the 4^th or 5^th grade. But it doesn’t happen for all readers. Have you ever read a paragraph or more of an article or book and have no idea what you have read because you were thinking of something else? This complete lack of comprehension is really a rather dramatic achievement and is the surest sign of fluency. You have performed an extremely complex cognitive task while your conscious brain was elsewhere, no doubt day-dreaming. But when students report this phenomenon, instead of celebrating this milestone of fluency, red flags go up for parents and teachers alike. What’s the point of reading if you have no comprehension of what you’ve just read? The usual solution involves slowing the reader down, incorporating lots of oral reading, as well as predicting and summarizing strategies. None of this promotes fluency.

Once reading has become automatic, once a reader is fluent, the part of the conscious brain freed for other activities, can be turned toward comprehension. In other words; fluency precedes comprehension. However much our young readers are struggling and frustrated, they must continue to devote most of their reading time to silent, independent practice. A good rule of thumb is that for every minute a student spends in oral reading, another 10 minutes should be spent reading silently, for it is only in lengthy silent practice that the miracle of fluency will occur.

Next time I will write about fluency targets and how to achieve them.