Hello Everyone. This is my first posting, so I hope you will all be gentle with me. I was asked to join the conversation inasmuch as I have been studying reading fluency for the past 27 years and have written widely about it over much the same period. My interested started when I tried to understand the struggling readers I worked with who seemed to be highly intelligent, yet had difficulty with reading and understanding what they read. When I first read about fluency it was an epiphany.
Let me begin by saying that I don't agree with all that has been done with fluency, particularly over the past ten years or so, in fact I strongly disagree with the direction it has generally been going. Your comments largely reflect my own thoughts on the issue. I do operate under the assumption, however naive it may be, that we are all trying to do what's right for kids. Even those folks who are doing odd things to reading fluency honestly believe they are helping children become good readers. Let me outline specifically my concerns and ideas related to fluency. Fluency is related to comprehension, quite strongly in fact. My own research has in fact found strong correlations between fluency and comprehension all the way through senior high school. We found we could predict high school students' performance on Ohio's High School Graduation Test (a silent reading comprehension test) with a measure of reading fluency (see Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2005). We have found similar results in working with older kids in Chicago and Omaha. Interestingly, however, policy makers are not terribly interested in fluency with older students. It's just not issue they say. I'd like for them to see that 9th grader who is reading without any expression or enthusiasm, or who reads at 25 words per minute. Think about it - if an average 9th grader reads at 150 words per minute, what would normally be an hour reading assignment for an average reading 9th grader now becomes a 6 hour marathon for the student reading at such a slow rate. And, I can tell you that we have a lot of kids in middle and high school who like this. Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating teaching kids to read fast for the sake of reading fast' but we have to at least consider it. My interest is in struggling readers. I run our reading clinic at Kent State and I believe it is a huge concern for students experiencing severe difficulty in reading. Mike Pressley and Nell Duke and another colleague wrote that among students experiencing severe difficulty in reading, between 75-90% of them have difficulties in reading fluency that are a significant source of their comprehension problems. I think that fluency is important for comprehension -- it is not necessarily comprehension, but it sets the stage for comprehension. Fluency has at least two components -- 1) automaticity -- recognizing the words so effortlessly (in the way that all of us are doing right now) that we can use our limited cognitive resources to make sense of the text, not just decode the words. Reading rate is a pretty good measure of automaticity, very strongly correlated with overall reading proficiency. And so measures such as DIBELS, AIMSWEB and others have been developed. To be honest, I use reading rate as a measure of automaticity in my own work. The problem has come when this MEASURE of automaticity has become SYNONYMOUS with automaticity - that is, as many of you have so clearly indicated, reading speed, not automaticity, has become the goal of reading fluency instruction. Now I see kids charting their reading rates, well meaning teachers invoking kids to read faster and faster,etc. I don't blame teachers -- they are hearing this from policy makers and others. Last year I did a little survey of kids in my region. I would ask them to name the best reader in their class. Once done, I would then ask them to tell me why that person is such a good reader. The number one answer was "He or she reads fast" Kids get what we teach them, and I think, they are all getting the wrong message here. Reading speed is a measure of automaticity in the same way the my dog's tail is an indicator of her happiness. But I don't make my dog happy by wagging her tail for her and I don't make a reader fluent by tell them to read fast. 2) There is a second component to fluency that gets acknowledged, but not much else -- prosody, or reading with expression. I think this is where we really connect fluency to comprehension. In reading, meaning is carried with the voice as well as with the words -- through our pausing, our tone, our emphasis, our phrasing etc. Even when we read silently I think we are still listening to voice in our heads. The US Dept of Ed has done two large scale studies which found a strong relationship between oral reading expression and silent reading comprehension. Kids who when reading orally read with expression tended to be the best comprehenders when reading silently. Kids who read like robots when reading orally (without regard for reading speed) tended to be the same kids who had difficulty with comprehension when reading silently. I think teaching kids to read with good expression needs to be as important a goal for reading instruction as automaticity. And yet, I think that is given very little attention. In fact, oral reading is given very little attention in schools.; and yet the research shows that the more oral reading done in classrooms is associated with higher reading achievement (see Rasinski & Hoffman, Reading Research Quarterly, 2003). I am not advocating round robin oral reading, but authentic oral reading. Automaticty and prosody in reading are, I believe, well established. The question becomes, how to teach both in ways that are authentic, engaging, and not overly time consuming. However I think I have written enough. I would love to read your responses. But let me close with a brief case study I did back in January. I love the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, admire his principals, but also his ability to communicate. I think most people would agree that he is one of the most fluent speakers/readers of all time. Yet, in January I printed out his I Have a Dream Speech and listened to his delivery of the speech from 1963. On impulse, I decided to subject his reading of the speech to the DIBELS oral reading fluency test. As you might expect he did not do well. I calculated his reading rate at 102 words correct per minute, the level of a primary grade student. It's hard to believe that if his speech was a test, it might have landed him in a remedial reading setting. Of course, no one in their right mind would claim that his speech, or any other great orator for that matter, was disfluent. We have to ask ourselves, what made that a fluent reading? The answer of course is not reading speed, but his use of prosody -- his pausing, his volume, his voicing, his phrasing, -- that is what gave the speech a deeper meaning than the words alone could do. Well guess that is enough for me. I hope that gives you a sense of where I am coming from when I talk about reading fluency. Thank you for reading this. Best wishes, tim rasinski At 06:39 PM 5/25/2007 -0700, you wrote: >What I think honestly, is that DIBELS doesn't assess students as much >as it trains them in an approach to text. I have all the independent >research including Michael Pressley's study of DIBELS. I hate to even >get into that because it's really controversial and controversy can be >divisive. On the other hand, it can also push our thinking. I know I >need to constantly rethink my positions. So as far as DIBELS goes, I >can always refer to the research. > >And yes-- the comprehension section on it does indeed have the assessor >count the number of words in the story that the kids recite whether or >not they are even in sequence. That is efficient training of an >approach-- look at the words, look at the details, don't put together >the big picture or it literally works against you if you paraphrase, or >expand on the text or personally relate to it using your own words. I >found the research on DIBELS in particular and on fluency in general to >be just fascinating. It is in such opposition to what schools are told >and sold. > >On Friday, May 25, 2007, at 05:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > In a message dated 5/25/2007 10:42:45 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > > I totally agree with your definition of fluency-- that it must be > > inseparable from comprehension. However, I would note that assessments > > such as DIBELS and some fluency programs > > You are right about the DIBELS. I was very disturbed when we looked > > at it > > that the way they measured comprehension of the passage was by > > counting the > > number of words the child used in their retell. This is one of the > > major > > reasons we never purchased it. > > > > I am not advocating fluency programs at all. I really don't think you > > need > > one. I think the reason we see so many now is because it is easy to > > package > > and sell. I teach my fluency lessons with text the children are > > reading and > > short passages that are on an appropriate level for the child. I > > also vary > > the genre to be sure they understand how to read these as well. > > > > > > I'm > > understanding your posts, you believe that fluency and comprehension > > are reciprocal--that each influences the other. That's what the > > research shows too. > > Yes that is exactly what I was saying. > > > > The difference in what many teachers are being told > > is that if we train kids to read quickly, comprehension will follow. > > Actually, the research shows that's not the case. Comprehension does > > not just suddenly pop up when a child can read a passage flawlessly. > > > > That is absolutely right. That is why we have to understand that when > > someone says they teach fluency it does not merely mean we time the > > children and > > get a score. It is so much more than that and should be included in > > the > > reading instruction we do. I really teach it in reading as well as > > writing. > > > > I also agree with what you said about the data regarding ELLs and > > decoding > > instruction. Many ELLs that I have worked with are good word > > callers. They > > can call the words but do not have great comprehension. > > > > Laura > > readinglady.com > > > > > > > > > > ************************************** See what's free at > > http://www.aol.com. > > _______________________________________________ > > Mosaic mailing list > > [email protected] > > To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to > > http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/ > > mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. > > > > Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mosaic mailing list >[email protected] >To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to >http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. > >Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D. Reading and Writing Center 404 White Hall Kent State University Kent, OH 44242 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 330-672-0649 Cell: 330-962-6251 Fax: 330-672-2025 _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
