Fluency in Reading, Part 2

by Jack Farrell

Trustee, Mammoth USD

I spent the last 10 years conducting classroom research while I was a teacher and mentor to new teachers. My major focus was on reading and the role it plays in academic success. My students and I discovered a few truths about reading during the course of this research. I worked mainly with 9^th and 10^th graders in language arts. These were largely the students in the middle, the vast underserved section of the student body. Often the very best teachers are given to the top students and the most resources, including classroom aides, are dedicated to the students with learning challenges.

My students and I discovered that fluency was a problem. Many of them read silently at approximately the same rate they read orally, about 100 words per minute. The very best students were reading about three times faster. They were able to accomplish this by overcoming what reading specialists call sub-vocalizing, which is pronouncing each word silently as you read. The better readers accomplished this by reading phrases on sight, rather than by pronouncing each word in their heads. The biggest factor separating these two groups was not intelligence. Rather it was a function of how many hours a student had spent reading prior to high school, silently and independently. Fluency, and ultimately comprehension, was a direct result of countless hours spent in practice. This much practice cannot be accomplished solely at school. The most successful readers had devoted a large amount of time outside of school to independent reading, which resulted in doubling or tripling their silent reading rates.

My students and I worked very hard on their fluency, often with dramatic results. The typical student increased his reading rate about two and a half times while also increasing his comprehension. But we also discovered other interesting insights. For instance, even the best readers slowed down about one-third when moving from fiction to non-fiction. We eventually concluded that this was primarily due to the increase in complexity of non-fiction, both in its vocabulary and its structure. While we worked hard on increasing fluency in non-fiction, the students did not experience as much gain here, especially if the students were engaged in complex, content-area reading. No one reads a Physics text very fast, nor should he.

Many students I have interviewed have admitted that they do not engage in very much content area reading. The better students do lots of reading in self-chosen fiction, which their teachers and parents rightly encourage. But even these students will routinely skim chapters in science or social science, looking for the answers to assigned questions at the ends of the chapters. They do not consider skimming for the answers to be a short cut in any way. They feel that have legitimately done their homework. But my research concluded that how a text means is often as important as what a text means, especially for emergent readers.

My students and I also discovered that the best reason for reading any text was to become a better reader of the next text; that reading is a life-long pursuit; that we are always in transition to becoming a better version of the reader we are now.