Reading fluency: Reading, fast or slow?
20 September 2023
The smarter you get, the slower you read,
says Naval Ravikant - a leading investor in the world of tech giants.
Yes, an appetite for absorbing the detailed content of a piece of text does lead to slower and closer reading. In fact, fluent reading is likely to vary in pace depending on the style of the writing. It’s a bit like driving in traffic. For conditions that demand sharp focus and concentration, we slow our driving down. Likewise, when we have more favourable conditions, we can drive with greater ease and enjoy the journey more. But no matter what the conditions are like, we don’t become reckless. We don’t lose control of any part of the driving. Let’s discuss this in relation to early reading, the development of reading fluency, and how it is taught.
Is it better to read quickly or slowly?
The most proficient readers adapt their reading skills to match the text. In other words, being able to dial the reading speed up and down is a strong indicator of emerging reading fluency. Schools ensure that all children become confident fluent readers, so that every child can access a broad and balanced curriculum. Fluent reading underpins a love of reading and is an important skill for future learning and employment and it also enables children to apply their knowledge and skills with ease.
In the early reading phase, children learn to remember what they’ve been taught and to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts. In other words, children learn to coordinate different streams of information. This is a bit like learning to drive (for an adult), because many different elements need to be coordinated and practised until these become second nature - such as:
- selecting and operating either the brake or the gas pedal
- steering the vehicle smoothly
- communicating direction using the indicators
- anticipating the speed of travel
- aligning speed with changes involving gears and the clutch
- monitoring what other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians are doing on the road.
Fluent readers can:
- read accurately and with appropriate stress and intonation
- coordinate different streams of information very easily
- access each channel of information with ease
- read quickly, but adjust the speed of reading to suit the challenges of each passage
- monitor the meaning of the passage as they read.
In early reading, children who approach reading fluency without undue effort have coordinated their eyes, ears and voices:
- to appraise cues from pictures accompanying the passage
- to apply short term memory in order to locate the information in the passage in terms of time and place (context),
- to recall general knowledge from long term memory of how things happen (schema)
- to recognise the shapes of letters (graphemes)
- to discern the smallest sounds of language (phonemes)
- to articulate the relationship between the letter shape and its sound.
- to decode the words and to assign the grammatical function of each word in the sentence
- to access the lexicon (a child’s ‘word bank’) in order to retrieve the most likely words to match the information on the page.
Some of these channels of information are processed subconsciously and therefore at lightning speed. For example, the child’s lexicon (word bank) supplies the word that is the best match to the information on the page. The streams of information that contribute to the retrieval of a certain word are:
- word shape,
- sounds associated with the letters,
- context in short term memory
- schema (background knowledge) in the mind of the child.
In the earliest stages of learning to read, as the child learns to processes information about letters and sounds, they do this relatively slowly and consciously, using the thinking part the brain. It’s important that children allow the knowledge that they acquire during phonics training to inform their recognition of words, because after a period of initial ramping up and practice, it’s vital that this skill becomes second nature and that the speed of processing rapidly accelerates.
Fluent readers can read quickly, accurately and with appropriate stress and intonation, which aids comprehension by freeing up cognitive resources sufficiently to focus on meaning. Therefore, after the children have achieved a secure knowledge of phonics, fluency becomes an increasingly important factor in the development of reading comprehension.
However, many children experience ‘bumps in the road’ when they’re learning to read. They may have some stronger and some weaker channels of information processing. If there are weaknesses in attention, phonological discrimination or visual discrimination, the child will not be able to coordinate the many different channels of information that contribute to fluent reading.
What is reading word-by-word?
Reading word-by-word typically occurs among the lowest 20% of children: those who most need to improve in their reading. They need to refresh their attention for each word, as even reading an individual word can absorb all of their focus and attention.
Their fluency will not develop alongside that of their classmates and they will fall behind unless they receive an early reading intervention. Some teachers of reading assume that the skill of segmenting and blending phonemes is necessary for reading fluency to develop.
Actually, many children remain stuck at the ‘sounding-out’ stage of reading and do not become fluent readers, even though they know the correspondence between letters and their sounds. For these children, it’s likely that their attention is weak, and they lack the cognitive control to coordinate the various streams of information processing that support reading fluency.
What is speed reading?
Speed reading is measured in terms of how many words a person can read in one minute. This is known as words per minute (wpm).
Speed reading has been associated with having a higher level of intelligence, because people who read quickly are thought to consume more information and therefore become smarter. This association between speed reading and intelligence has led some teachers of reading to believe that reading faster is necessary for the development of good reading.
If building reading fluency were this simple, children with fast reading speeds would not -
- make accuracy errors
- need to reread the text to answer comprehension questions.
Although speed reading might appear attractive as an idea, and it is likely that a good reader can read fast, reading fast in itself does not necessarily develop into good reading.
Conclusion
At the heart of this is a huge misconception:
If a child prioritises speed, they may learn to decode the print into words, phrases and sentences. But, they may not have engaged with the grammar of the text.
As discussed, encouraging a child to read for speed may do more harm than good. If a child is praised for reading fast, they are more likely to experience reading as unrewarding, boring, a waste of their time and pointless.
If a child is encouraged to slow down and to discuss what has happened in each sentence, they will engage with the text as meaningful, even if they struggle to read independently. This communicative approach shows the children that they are reading in order to learn. Therefore, interactions between an adult and a child that involve talking, reasoning and extending spoken vocabulary are highly valuable, and they have been found to have significant effects on the development of early reading.
When reading at home with their children, parents can easily adopt these communicative approaches. Reading aloud is a good way of developing vocabulary as well as expressive language skills. They might also encourage their child to notice punctuation, the development of the narrative and any dialogue in the text.
Click here to see the full list of reading fluency tips in the Reading with Fluency Checklist.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, and you’d like to find out even more about the development of reading fluency, keep reading….
Reading fluency and comprehension in 2020 - here I discuss the relationship between resilience and fluency in relation to reading speed.
Discover the heartbeat of reading- this post explores the importance of bringing the grammatical cues in reading into systemic alignment.
Rhythmic elements in reading: From fluency to flow - a flow state is associated with reading for pleasure and fluency is a key to unlocking a flow state.
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