In the last posting, in response to a middle school teacher’s query, I explained why fluency instruction deserved attention in secondary school. I shared information showing growth in fluency during the middle school years, that instruction in fluency can accelerate that learning, and that such improvement can have a positive impact on reading comprehension.
Admittedly, not all secondary students require fluency support, but most do. Since oral reading fluency (ORF) usually tops out in the 175-200 words correct per minute (WCPM) range, we should expect that an increasing percentage of kids each year will be beyond the need for fluency teaching. Fewer 9th graders will require fluency teaching than will the 8th graders, and fewer 8th graders will need it than the 7th graders.
Likewise, in schools with especially high reading achievement, there would be less need for attention to fluency than in lower achieving schools. In other words, it’s probable that more kids at any grade level in the high achieving schools will have accomplished that 175-200wcpm goal. In my opinion, as long as 40-50% of the students lag below the target range, it should be addressed explicitly and regularly in the regular classes. As the percentage of kids with sufficient fluency grows, then it becomes more of a Tier 2 issue, with fluency instruction provided on an as needed basis for kids in instructional arrangements beyond the regular classroom. Who knows? If enough middle schools taught fluency, fluency instruction in regular high school classes might not be necessary at all.
Fluency instruction with older students has often led to improvements in reading comprehension, but that has not always been the case, and it isn’t true for all students.
The reason for that seeming inconsistency I suspect has to do with the complexity of literacy. Text reading fluency is a necessary, but insufficient condition for comprehension. If you can’t read a text fluently, you’re unlikely to get much from it. However, even if you’re highly fluent, limited vocabulary or other language limitations or low levels of content knowledge could still undermine your ability to understand what you’re reading.
Vocabulary and fluency have opposite evolutions when it comes to comprehension (Schatschneider, Buck, Torgesen, Wagner, Hassler, Hecht, & Powell-Smith, 2004; Singer, 1965). The correlation of fluency with comprehension starts out high and diminishes over time. As increasing numbers of students reach the target fluency range, its correlation with comprehension attenuates. In contrast, with young children, vocabulary has a low correlation with comprehension because their vocabularies tend to be much larger than the vocabularies of beginning reading texts. Since almost all the beginners already know the meanings of all the words, word knowledge doesn’t differentiate comprehension success. But each year, the texts students are expected to read increase in vocabulary extensiveness and variability, so the correlation of vocabulary and comprehension steadily increases.
This pattern is likely the same for other aspects of literacy including background knowledge, syntax, cohesion, discourse structure, graphic elements, and so on. As texts increase in complexity, these skills grow in importance when it comes to comprehension.
That means literacy requires the deployment and coordination of a plethora of skills and abilities. Secondary school teachers should teach fluency, but they also must teach students to deal with the conceptual and linguistic demands of increasingly complex disciplinary texts. Fluency is just one of the many essential aspects of literacy.
Perhaps the best study of fluency instruction that had a significant impact on reading comprehension with older students was one conducted by Landreth and Young (2021). They did some things differently than I would have, but what they did was productive – kids did better – so it’s worth considering their approach.
First, they worked with special texts that they had chosen for the purpose of teaching fluency. That ensured that the texts were appealing to the students and would be worth practicing; for instance, they could include texts with complex syntax demands.
My approach to that would be different. I’d rather have students practicing with texts that they would need to read in their academic classes. For classroom teachers in any discipline, that would be an easier lift. If students are reading a novel in English, a textbook in science, or a primary document in history, why not use those for fluency practice? Practicing with such texts should foster both fluency improvement and increased academic knowledge. Scarborough (2011) had students do this kind of thing with their social studies textbooks, for instance, and it was successful.
If this instruction were in a Tier 2 remedial setting, I’d still want to use the classroom texts. That’s tougher, of course, because it requires coordination between the regular and special teachers, but it’s well worth it. The payoffs are especially big if the Tier 2 fluency work can precede the classroom use of the texts, putting these students on a more equal reading footing with their classmates.
Second, Landreth and Chase wisely avoided round robin reading and popcorn. You know, having one student reading something aloud while everyone else listens or supposedly follows along. That approach is wasteful. No one gets much fluency practice that way; only one student reads at a time, and if it doesn’t go well, there is rarely any rereading to improve the performance. Many students find this kind of reading to be anxiety provoking, which shifts their attention from reading improvement and comprehension to fear and loathing.
Instead of round robin, the researchers depended on lots of choral reading. The students, as a whole or half class, would read the texts in unison under teacher guidance.
I’m always concerned about the kids who hide out during choral reading – letting the other kids’ reading cover their tracks. That means that I rely less on choral reading than they did in this scheme, but, again, it was productive overall in this case. The kids in the classrooms that did this made greater progress than those in the comparison classes.
Third, Landreth and Young engaged students in repeated reading. The kids didn’t just read a text aloud, but they read the texts several times each week within their time constraints (10 minutes each day). This makes sense since studies show that repeated reading can be beneficial (NICHD, 2000).
My concern in this case is that it might be more repetitious than necessary. Students may be better off reading multiple texts with fewer repeats, than one text with more repetition (Kuhn, 2005). It appears best to keep the numbers of readings to 2 or 3.
Personally, I’d rely more on paired repeated reading than choral reading. In this, students take turns reading a portion of text to their partner with the teacher observing and interacting with the duos; making sure kids are rereading when disfluency is apparent, offering guidance and modeling as needed, and so on.
I mentioned that many teachers are concerned that students will refuse to read aloud. Landreth and Young do away with this problem with choral reading – reading in unison greatly reduces anxiety. Paired reading with everyone participating tends to work the same way. When half the class is reading simultaneously, embarrassment disappears like magic.
Fourth, they had the teachers model the text reading using the texts that students were going to work on. On Monday, teachers introduced the texts by reading them to the class.
When I reviewed the research for the National Reading Panel, I found no difference in effectiveness between approaches that included modeling and those that didn’t. Accordingly, I tend to use modeling when students are having trouble with a text or to point out a potential hurdle, like a particularly complex sentence.
In any event, the key to successful modeling is to do it with text the students are going to try to read. Sometimes teachers read other texts aloud to students or use Audible to do that. They claim it’s modeling, that it shows students what reading should sound like. In my experience that doesn’t cut it. The models are just too distant from what the students are being asked to do to have pedagogical value.
Fifth, Landreth and Young wanted to avoid having kids focused on fast reading. Too often with fluency instruction, kids are encouraged to hurry. Think, for instance, of schemes that include students timing the readings.
There is nuance to be considered here. Research shows that for these older readers, the biggest gains in fluency tend to be due to improvements in reading rate more than in accuracy (Williams, Skinner, Floyd, Hale, Neddenriep, & Kirk, 2011).
That makes sense, but emphasizing speed improvement misses the point. Remember we’re trying to improve fluency for the purpose of enabling comprehension. Fluency is a combination of accuracy (reading the words as printed), automaticity (accomplishing this reading without conscious attention), and prosody (making the reading sound like language). As such, speed is an imperfect indicator of automaticity. A fast reading rate suggests that kids are translating print to language without much effort; effort that may distract from comprehension. But fast reading is not the goal. Trying to get kids to read fast will likely deflect from the real purpose.
Landreth and Young de-emphasized speed by including performance in their plan. On Friday, after working on the texts all week, the students presented their texts or portions of the texts to the class. They found that students made a greater effort to make sure their texts were prosodic, pausing in the right places, emphasizing the right words, and so on; which also ensures that they sound meaningful.
Another way this can be accomplished is to provide students with parsed text to practice on. Parsed text shows students where the pauses go and this plays a role in both fluency and comprehension development (Breen, Van Dyke, Krivocapic, & Landi, 2024).
Here is an example of a parsed text, this one the Gettysburg Address.
Four score and seven years ago, / our fathers / brought forth / on this continent, / a new nation, / conceived in Liberty, / and dedicated /to the proposition / that all men / are created equal. /
Now, / we / are engaged / in a great civil war, / testing whether / that nation, / or any nation / so conceived / and so dedicated, / can long endure. / We /are met / on a great battlefield / of that war. / We / have come / to dedicate / a portion / of that field, / as a final resting place / for those / who here / gave their lives, / that / that nation / might live. / It / is, / altogether fitting and proper, / that we / should do this. /
But, / in a larger sense, / we / cannot dedicate, / cannot consecrate, / cannot hallow, / this ground. / The brave men, / living and dead, / who struggled here, / have consecrated it, / far above / our poor power / to add or detract. / The world / will little note, / nor long remember, / what we / say here, / but / it / can never forget / what they / did here. / It / is for us, / the living, / rather, / to be dedicated here / to the unfinished work / which they / who fought here / have thus far / so nobly advanced. / It / is rather / for us / to be here dedicated to / the great task / remaining before us — / that from these honored dead, / we / take increased devotion / to that cause / for which they / gave / the last full measure / of devotion — / that we / here highly resolve / that these dead / shall not have died / in vain — / that / this nation, / under God, / shall have / a new birth / of freedom — / and that government / of the people, / by the people, / for the people, / shall not perish / from the earth.
Initially, teachers may parse the texts for fluency practice. This guidance tends to improve prosody, but also comprehension (Stevens, 1981). Over time, teachers may involve the kids in parsing the texts themselves. I prefer having kids do this in pairs, which usually involves lots of discussion of the meaning of the texts and lots of fluency practice in trying out the parsing to see if it sounds right. Such activity can improve reading achievement (Mason & Kendall, 1978; Weaver, 1979).
The question that inspired this blog asked how much fluency instruction middle school students should get. That’s much easier to answer for elementary school, where students have fewer teachers and more dedicated reading instruction time.
In the Landreth and Young study, the instruction was delivered to struggling readers for 10 minutes per day each week; not quite an hour in total. That would be a lot of time in a regular classroom if only one teacher did it.
I’m not saying that time allocation would be impossible in a typical ELA class, though it would be easier to pull off in a “double block” English period like the one the questioner asked about.
It would be even more doable, however, if all the academic teachers accepted this as a shared responsibility, with each department signing on to provide some number of minutes to these kinds of activities each week with the texts of their curriculum. Because the focus is on reading the texts of each class, no one is being asked to reduce their attention to what they’re teaching. Kids are working with the same texts they would otherwise, just in ways that will accelerate their progress, and because the time commitment is weekly rather than daily, teachers have flexibility in how and when they fit this into their schedules.
That kind of plan can ensure that kids get at least an hour a week of fluency work, and this can be increased for the strugglers who merit Tier 2 help.
Teachers should also have flexibility when it comes to what to do with the students who’ve already reached that 175-200wcpm goal. Those kids could still be included in the fluency activities, or the teachers may choose to have them reading the same texts silently.
ELA teachers can take responsibility for monitoring student success, updating the other teachers as to who won’t need additional fluency work.
Too many kids are slipping through the reading cracks in secondary school, undermining their chances for academic success. Greater attention to fluency instruction in the upper grades can go a long way towards addressing this problem, and studies show it can work. These days there is a lot of concern about the “decoding threshold” with older readers, and studies suggest that fluency work could go a long way towards helping with that, too (NICHD, 2000).
References
Breen, M., Van Dyke, J. A., Krivocapic, J., & Landi, N. (2024). Prosodic features in production reflect reading comprehension skill in high school students. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50(10, 1662-1682. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001355
Kuhn, M. R. (2005). A comparative study of small group fluency instruction, Reading Psychology, 26(2), 127-146. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710590930492
Landreth, S. J., & Young, C. (2021). Developing fluency and comprehension with the secondary fluency routine. Journal of Educational Research, 114(3), 252-262. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2021.1910475
Mason, J., & Kendall, J. (1978). Facilitating reading comprehension through text-structure manipulation. (Technical report no. 92). Urbana-Champaign, IL: Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Scarborough, A. C. (2012). Using empirically validated reading strategies to improve middle school students’ reading fluency of classroom textbooks. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University.
Schatschneider, C.; Buck, J.; Torgesen, J.; Wagner, R.; Hassler, L.; Hecht, S.; Powell-Smith, K. (2004). A multivariate study of individual differences in performance on the reading portion of the comprehensive assessment test: A preliminary report. Florida State University, Florida Center for Reading Research
Singer, H. (1965). Substrata-factor reorganization accompanying development of general reading ability at the elementary school level. Final report, Contract No. 2011, U.S. Office of Education.
Stevens, K. C. (1981). Chunking material as an aid to reading comprehension. Journal of Reading 25(2), 126-129. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40030265
Weaver, P. A. (1979). Improving reading comprehension: Effects of sentence organization instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 15(1), 129-146. https://www.jstor.org/stable/747435
Williams, J. L., Skinner, C. H., Floyd, R. G., Hale, A. D., Neddenriep, C., & Kirk, E. P. (2011). Words correct per minute: The variance in standardized reading scores accounted for by reading speed. Psychology in the Schools, 48(2), 87-101. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20527
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