Let's Talk Fluency

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Knowledge is important for meaning

When we talk about reading, recent trends have meant that we’re mostly only going to be talking about decoding. You know, looking at a word and using the letters to sound it out. There was that popular podcast and a flurry of state laws that refocused elementary curriculum purchases on decoding. Parents and advocates are showing up at schools asking whether they use “evidence based” reading programs and what they usually are asking is whether kids are explicitly taught to decode. Good! I’ve long been a fan of teaching decoding and the more atomized parts of decoding: phonemic awareness and phonics. I built an entire intervention system for struggling readers entering high school and one of the biggest parts was making sure the kids could decode unfamiliar words.

The important thing to know is that decoding is, at best, half of the puzzle here. Being able to decode a word does not magically give students the ability to know what that word means. Meaning is the product of knowledge, and the combination of decoding and knowledge is what we call reading comprehension. If we’re being persnickety, we could say that it’s specifically oral language knowledge for beginning readers. We’re also increasingly recognizing the usefulness of factual background knowledge and that this process plays out for readers of all ages, not just new readers. We want children to learn to read so they also have to build up various reserves of knowledge in addition to being able to decode. Reading comprehension, the ability to know the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and longer texts in both fiction and non-fiction, is the goal.

Information processing theory reminds us that our cognitive systems only have so much bandwidth to devote to a mental task at any given time. With regard to reading, this means that the more work our brains are doing to decode the words in a phrase or sentence, the less they can work on connecting those words to their background knowledge or oral language knowledge. We need kids to learn to be proficient enough decoders to the point where decoding reaches what is called automaticity. With sufficient practice, most kids will no longer be sounding out most words phoneme by phoneme but will be able to look at the word and immediately know how to pronounce it. At that point, decoding ceases to become a major drain on their cognitive bandwidth and kids can more rapidly connect words and knowledge in order to achieve comprehension. Broadly speaking, this shift happens around the third grade and most schools I know begin explicitly seeding some reading comprehension instruction in the latter half of second grade. Typically, some of that comprehension work comes from working on fluency.

Fluency is Underrated

In addition to leaving out discussions of knowledge and comprehension, we also don’t hear much in the public discourse about fluency. As an old hat when it comes to literacy, this confuses me because elementary teachers traditionally spend a lot of time working on fluency. We recognize that fluency is the connection between decoding and comprehension. It’s the way we can tell where a kid’s cognitive resources are going. Fluency has three main components (some say four but it’s splitting hairs, really): accuracy, rate, and expression. These actually tell us a lot about a kid’s reading ability and whether they’re making the jump to being more focused on comprehension. Accuracy is decoding. Are they correctly saying out loud all of the words they encounter as they read? And it is pretty much all of the words. 98% accuracy is the goal to be considered fluent. Rate is, as you’d expect, how quickly you can accurately read the words. The target rate increases as kids age but in general we want them to be 98% accurate at 110 words per minute by the time they’re in 5th grade. This is roughly half the speed of proficient adult readers but is roughly the same average speed as typical adult readers.

That brings us to the third, and I’d argue most crucial part, expression. You see, kids can learn to decode enough to be able to correctly pronounce 98% of the words they read at an adequate rate but still not know what anything means. This is known as “word calling” and is pretty common. It’s a symptom of not having adequate knowledge to connect those correctly pronounced words to something you know about language, the text, or about the world. So, in order to account for word calling, we look at expression as the final component of fluency. You see, if a kid reads a few sentences about someone getting excited, or celebrating, or being happy, they should adjust the pitch and tone of their voices to match the content of the sentences. Happy things in the text should be made to sound happy and sad things to sound sad. If a kid isn’t doing despite being able to accurately say all the words, it’s a sign that they are lacking crucial knowledge and aren’t able to arrive at the meaning of what they’re reading. It’s worth noting that if they aren’t accurately saying words then you have a decoding problem and if they’re not reading quickly then they need support in developing automaticity. That’s the power of fluency as a concept and as a diagnostic tool for teachers. From a single passage read out loud you can assess if a kid needs more decoding support, to practice using those decoding skills, or to build knowledge of the content in order to generate meaning.

There’s one other part related to that knowledge component that I should really mention, and this is where differentiating between types of knowledge comes in handy. First, there’s the factual knowledge of the meaning of the words in a text. If kids just don’t know the words, being able to pronounce them won’t do much good. Then, there’s the oral language knowledge that tells kids what they should sound like if a passage is exciting, sad, etc. They need to be explicitly taught how reading something exciting should sound and beyond that, they need to grasp that the emotions are in the words, not necessarily in their own hearts and minds. Kids will tell you that a passage about a boy getting a surprise present is boring, that they are bored, and that they don’t think they should sound excited because they do not think it’s exciting. This is why we practice choral reading, echo reading, and a variety of other oral language practices, so that kids can hear how the words should sound.

Critically, we should all understand these things as knowledge and not skills. Kids need to know how to decode. Kids need the knowledge of the meaning of words and concepts they are likely to encounter in print. Kids need the knowledge of how the meaning of the language of a sentence makes someone change their voice. This is the core of comprehension and is absolutely a prerequisite to adding more complexity to comprehension, such as figurative language and symbolism. One of the biggest sins of the Common Core era was the conflation of knowledge for skills and fluency was probably one of the biggest areas where this conflation became counterproductive.

It’s Schemas All The Way Down

So, why am I word vomiting about fluency right now? For one, I was thinking about fluency when I read a recent post from Luke Morin about reading difficult texts. Luke is a middle school teacher and was working with his students using an activity called Tea Party where they draw short snippets of texts from a hat and then make predictions about what would happen next. Here’s the example he focused on for his post:

Luke uses this as a way into using close reading to model the kinds of practices that kids need when encountering complex texts. It’s super refreshing to encounter this, by the way, because so often the skill-based version of this story simplifies the texts so that kids can master the skill. But, like Luke, we should be considering this a knowledge problem, not a skill one. There are things the kids did not know that prevented them from engaging deeply with this text snippet. Here Luke uses the language of Schema Theory, one of the more important ideas connecting the work of constructivists and information processing theorists.

Now, by this point you might be asking what this has to do with fluency. Luke is, after all, talking about comprehension work. Luke’s post reminded me that reading is schemas all the way down. What Luke sees as “inane student writing” exists because they’re only operating at the level of basic fluency. They can say the words and know the literal meanings of words but get stuck because they lack the knowledge to read complex texts.

Specifically, they need explicit support working with figurative language, implicit meaning, defining unfamiliar new words, and identifying the tone of the writing. That work only happens because they already have a schema in place for reading more literally. That more literal reading only works because they have a schema in place for reading fluently. Fluent reading combines schemas for decoding, literal word meanings, and emoting based on language. Those, in turn, relay on schemas for things like phonemic awareness or using the pitch and tone of your own voice, and so on. Learning is the process of creating schemas and then updating, modifying, or replacing them as you encounter what’s new and unexpected. Luke’s kids were encountering challenging text but really only had basic comprehension knowledge because their textual schema seems, to me at least, to be what they developed at the tail end of elementary fluency work.

Anyway, to wrap it all up, I think we don’t talk about fluency enough and that’s too bad. We’re obsessed with talking about phonics and its constituent practices because we’ve been led to believe that nobody teaches phonics. Meanwhile comprehension languishes and fluency has basically vanished from the conversation. When we do take the time to center reading fluency, it helps us think more clearly about what we want students to leave school being able to do. Fluency also helps us better understand the connection between what we do when we teach kids to decode and what we expect them to do as actual readers. Importantly, fluency helps us see that many reading “skills” are, in fact, bits of knowledge that kids need to be taught, often explicitly, before they can become proficient enough to move on to more complex tasks. Finally, focusing on fluency lets us better understand how the overall cycle of literacy learning works, as schema change or are replaced as complexity grows. As the meme up top suggests, fluency is in dire need of resurfacing and I’d love to see more mention of it in public discussions of reading curriculum and policy.

Thanks for reading!