Fluency in the Language Arts Classroom
[1,177 words]
In my last posting to this reading blog I suggested that Language Arts teachers should work on fluency every day. Here is the excerpt:
1. Work every day on fluency.
a. In all my hours of classroom observation I have never seen any strategy in use whose purpose was to increase reading fluency.
b. However, in my classroom the past two years, my students worked daily on increasing their fluency, the goal being to make their reading so automatic that their brains are freed for the higher order cognitive task of comprehension. One way to increase fluency is for students to time chunks of their reading on a daily basis and record their reading rate. There are various ways to implement this important strategy and I will talk about them in a subsequent post.
Fluency, or what some reading researchers refer to as automaticity, is rarely a part of reading instruction after decoding has been more or less mastered by the 3rd grade. In fact, almost every intervention available to the classroom teacher when reading comprehension problems surface, directly works against fluency. As soon as young readers can competently decode a passage but fail to remember anything of what they have read, the research points instruction toward a host of oral strategies involving read-alouds and think-alouds, as well as graphic organizers to help struggling readers improve their comprehension. Students are taught to read slowly aloud, to stop frequently to summarize what they have read, to pause periodically and question the text, and to pause occasionally to predict where the text is headed. I am of the opinion that any strategy which retards fluency ultimately dooms readers to years of agonizingly slow reading and problematic comprehension.
Almost any skill can become automatic and one of the curious outcomes of automaticity is the ability of the brain to do something else while engaged in this task. A good example would be driving. Have you ever driven to the market and when you got there had no idea how you did? In other words, you daydreamed your way there and cannot much recall the stop signs or lights you observed along the way. Did you drive safely? For the most part, the answer is yes. Routine driving is such an automatic task for the veteran driver that your brain can take care of it while freeing up another part of the brain for higher-order thinking, as in planning or just plain musing. This is one reason why young drivers are so terrible at the task; they are not automatic drivers yet and it needs their full attention. One of the first signs that young readers are automatizing the task is their ability to accurately decode a passage while their mind contemplates something else. However, as soon as a student reports this phenomena, red flags go up and a whole host of oral strategies, which unintentionally impede fluency and automaticity, come out.
Let’s return to the automatic adult driver who can operate heavy machinery safely at a high rate of speed while he daydreams. Now let’s put that driver into dire conditions: an icy mountain road with snowfall and high winds. How much day dreaming do you suppose he is doing now? Less dramatic, just put him on an unfamiliar road where he is trying to find his way. What is his attention to task now? We daydream when we are able to and refrain from it when we must. I submit that daydreaming while reading is a transitional phase and to be embraced rather than feared. When you think about it, visualizing something else while you are accurately reading a passage indicates not only an automatic reader, but a highly evolved brain. The teacher’s task is not to slow the reader down and turn the task into an oral one, complete with graphic organizers and predicting strategies. It is rather to put that reader on an icy, windy road at night. That is, the teacher should encourage more fluency, rather than less, and, at the same time, turn the student’s brain back from daydreaming, already a higher order cognitive skill, to an even higher one, that of comprehending, in real time, what the text is saying. An automatic driver can pay attention to the road when he needs to; so can an automatic reader. The teacher’s job is to create that need.
One way to increase student fluency is to work on it often, as often as daily, in class. It only takes a few minutes of class time and can be combined with other tasks. If I were designing a textbook, I would place word counts periodically in texts, in both non-fiction and fiction selections. If you keep the counts to 500-1000 word passages, it will utilize only 3-5 minutes of class time. You can do this with your own text by using the ‘word count’ feature under the ‘tools’ menu in Microsoft Word. Thus any document you can create in, or convert to, a Word document you can place word counts in. Just highlight the text and then check the word count on the ‘tools’ menu. There are several ways to time the passages. The low-tech. way would be to use your own watch or a stopwatch and begin writing the time on the board after a minute or two in 15 second increments. This will give students a gross idea of their fluency. If you have an overhead projector, you can purchase a timer. You can locate these on the internet.
The high-tech. classroom, with an LCD projector attached to a computer, affords the opportunity of placing a stopwatch and countdown timer on your desktop.
The formula for computing reading speed is to take the total number of words in a passage, say 500 and multiply by 60. This yields a factor of 30,000. The student records his time in minutes and seconds and then converts to seconds [remember that time is on base 60]. As an example, let’s say a student read this passage in 2 minutes. That converts to 120 seconds. Reading speed is then a simple division problem. You divide 30,000 by 120, which yields a rate of 250 words per minute. Most students have calculators for use in their math classes. If not, there are inexpensive ones for about $4.00 that students can purchase at their local drug store. Reading a passage and figuring and logging the reading rate, takes only a few minutes of class time.
What can the students read? You can download entire novels from the On-Line Books page and chunk it out using Microsoft Word. You can also copy/paste passages from online Encyclopedia having to do with literary terms, genres, literary criticism, and literary periods into a word document. From experience, I have found that the World Book Encyclopedia is written at about the 9th grade level and the Encyclopedia Britannica is written at post high school, but is wonderfully challenging for 10th grade and beyond.
From collecting quite a bit of data on this activity I can offer some observations:
1. The secondary student in the middle of the reading test score range, reads about 150-250 words per minute in grade level appropriate fiction. The students in the top 20% in reading score, read about 100 words per minute faster.
2. These same students slow down their speed ¼ to 1/3 when moving from fiction to non-fiction.
3. All students can read faster (a sign of automaticity) with practice. The average student doubled his reading rate in fiction over the course of a year-long semester block working on fluency virtually every class period.
I will have more to say about follow-up activities in a subsequent post.
1. Work every day on fluency.
a. In all my hours of classroom observation I have never seen any strategy in use whose purpose was to increase reading fluency.
b. However, in my classroom the past two years, my students worked daily on increasing their fluency, the goal being to make their reading so automatic that their brains are freed for the higher order cognitive task of comprehension. One way to increase fluency is for students to time chunks of their reading on a daily basis and record their reading rate. There are various ways to implement this important strategy and I will talk about them in a subsequent post.
Fluency, or what some reading researchers refer to as automaticity, is rarely a part of reading instruction after decoding has been more or less mastered by the 3rd grade. In fact, almost every intervention available to the classroom teacher when reading comprehension problems surface, directly works against fluency. As soon as young readers can competently decode a passage but fail to remember anything of what they have read, the research points instruction toward a host of oral strategies involving read-alouds and think-alouds, as well as graphic organizers to help struggling readers improve their comprehension. Students are taught to read slowly aloud, to stop frequently to summarize what they have read, to pause periodically and question the text, and to pause occasionally to predict where the text is headed. I am of the opinion that any strategy which retards fluency ultimately dooms readers to years of agonizingly slow reading and problematic comprehension.
Almost any skill can become automatic and one of the curious outcomes of automaticity is the ability of the brain to do something else while engaged in this task. A good example would be driving. Have you ever driven to the market and when you got there had no idea how you did? In other words, you daydreamed your way there and cannot much recall the stop signs or lights you observed along the way. Did you drive safely? For the most part, the answer is yes. Routine driving is such an automatic task for the veteran driver that your brain can take care of it while freeing up another part of the brain for higher-order thinking, as in planning or just plain musing. This is one reason why young drivers are so terrible at the task; they are not automatic drivers yet and it needs their full attention. One of the first signs that young readers are automatizing the task is their ability to accurately decode a passage while their mind contemplates something else. However, as soon as a student reports this phenomena, red flags go up and a whole host of oral strategies, which unintentionally impede fluency and automaticity, come out.
Let’s return to the automatic adult driver who can operate heavy machinery safely at a high rate of speed while he daydreams. Now let’s put that driver into dire conditions: an icy mountain road with snowfall and high winds. How much day dreaming do you suppose he is doing now? Less dramatic, just put him on an unfamiliar road where he is trying to find his way. What is his attention to task now? We daydream when we are able to and refrain from it when we must. I submit that daydreaming while reading is a transitional phase and to be embraced rather than feared. When you think about it, visualizing something else while you are accurately reading a passage indicates not only an automatic reader, but a highly evolved brain. The teacher’s task is not to slow the reader down and turn the task into an oral one, complete with graphic organizers and predicting strategies. It is rather to put that reader on an icy, windy road at night. That is, the teacher should encourage more fluency, rather than less, and, at the same time, turn the student’s brain back from daydreaming, already a higher order cognitive skill, to an even higher one, that of comprehending, in real time, what the text is saying. An automatic driver can pay attention to the road when he needs to; so can an automatic reader. The teacher’s job is to create that need.
One way to increase student fluency is to work on it often, as often as daily, in class. It only takes a few minutes of class time and can be combined with other tasks. If I were designing a textbook, I would place word counts periodically in texts, in both non-fiction and fiction selections. If you keep the counts to 500-1000 word passages, it will utilize only 3-5 minutes of class time. You can do this with your own text by using the ‘word count’ feature under the ‘tools’ menu in Microsoft Word. Thus any document you can create in, or convert to, a Word document you can place word counts in. Just highlight the text and then check the word count on the ‘tools’ menu. There are several ways to time the passages. The low-tech. way would be to use your own watch or a stopwatch and begin writing the time on the board after a minute or two in 15 second increments. This will give students a gross idea of their fluency. If you have an overhead projector, you can purchase a timer. You can locate these on the internet.
The high-tech. classroom, with an LCD projector attached to a computer, affords the opportunity of placing a stopwatch and countdown timer on your desktop.
The formula for computing reading speed is to take the total number of words in a passage, say 500 and multiply by 60. This yields a factor of 30,000. The student records his time in minutes and seconds and then converts to seconds [remember that time is on base 60]. As an example, let’s say a student read this passage in 2 minutes. That converts to 120 seconds. Reading speed is then a simple division problem. You divide 30,000 by 120, which yields a rate of 250 words per minute. Most students have calculators for use in their math classes. If not, there are inexpensive ones for about $4.00 that students can purchase at their local drug store. Reading a passage and figuring and logging the reading rate, takes only a few minutes of class time.
What can the students read? You can download entire novels from the On-Line Books page and chunk it out using Microsoft Word. You can also copy/paste passages from online Encyclopedia having to do with literary terms, genres, literary criticism, and literary periods into a word document. From experience, I have found that the World Book Encyclopedia is written at about the 9th grade level and the Encyclopedia Britannica is written at post high school, but is wonderfully challenging for 10th grade and beyond.
From collecting quite a bit of data on this activity I can offer some observations:
1. The secondary student in the middle of the reading test score range, reads about 150-250 words per minute in grade level appropriate fiction. The students in the top 20% in reading score, read about 100 words per minute faster.
2. These same students slow down their speed ¼ to 1/3 when moving from fiction to non-fiction.
3. All students can read faster (a sign of automaticity) with practice. The average student doubled his reading rate in fiction over the course of a year-long semester block working on fluency virtually every class period.
I will have more to say about follow-up activities in a subsequent post.