Fluency: Finding Flow in Early Reading
27 December 2023
The pupils who most need to improve in terms of reading fluency (the lowest twenty percent of children) require support from the most effective teachers. Teaching effectiveness is known to be a strong predictor of pupils’ progress throughout school and for these children, pedagogy that develops a sense of mastery through repetition, reviewing and building familiarity with new words, supports the development of confident and fluent reading.
Distinguished pedagogue Professor Marie M Clay is best known for her Reading (and writing) Recovery programme. Her research began in 1976 and hundreds of thousands of children have benefited from her work. Her expertise in fluency in reading is based on her detailed observations of the experiences of struggling readers. For example, in her ‘hierarchy of knowing words’ we can appreciate the varied experiences of the children she taught as they grappled with new words, and practised these until they became familiar. This hierarchy provides a six step process, which is helpful because the teacher can identify and monitor progress long before the child becomes a fluent reader.
A six step process
The entry point in this hierarchy is as a ‘new’ word. Then, the word becomes ‘only just known’ as it still retains its novelty value and may protrude and not yet fall into its place with other words. As the word becomes more familiar, it is ‘successfully problem-solved’ by the child - in what Clay describes as one of a ‘repertoire of behaviours’. In the fourth iteration of this process, the word may be ‘easily produced, but easily thrown’ - in other words it might trip the child up and disrupt the flow of reading. The next level suggests that the word has become more integrated within the child’s lexicon, as a word that is ‘well known and recognised in most contexts’.
At this point, the child relies on context during the integration of external (print, illustrations and prompts from an adult) and internal processes (memory, including the sound and shape of the word in the articulatory system). Finally, when a word is ‘known in many variant forms’ it is likely to contribute to the fluent reading of a passage. This chimes well with the generative notion of language as recursive, with each word sparking a new stream of thoughts and ideas.
The meeting of the internal and the external aspects of decoding are described by Clay in terms of visual information (the ‘input’ from the eyes) merging with ‘vast amounts of information about that word gathered in past experiences’ so that the more familiar words are read ‘in a flash’.
Place not pace
Although, ‘new’ words are read slowly and it is appropriate for beginner readers to allow time to focus upon and to assimilate them, Clay was clear that the journey from slow word-by-word decoding to reading fast and with fluency was not about pace, but rather it was about the place of the word within a phrase:
“We have to think about phrasing in reading….To be more technical, the reader has put several words into a grammatical phrase (or into a grammatical context)” (Clay, 2005, p.150).
From a rhythm-based perspective, a musical phrase is also felt as a unit of meaning and context. And yet there is a broader context to consider. Let us pause to reflect for a moment on the importance of the context (and biographical narrative) of the child’s nervous system. This would include their perceptions of challenge, threat and fear versus those of safety, play and social engagement. We might ask to what extent does the emotional set-point of this child influence their capacity to engage with reading?
Building capacity for fluency
Reading at home every day with a parent or an older sibling fosters fluency through nurturing and social engagement. For children who have not had this level of input at home, co-regulation through one-on-one intervention may also be necessary to build the capacity that a child needs to engage with reading. After all, if their attention is disrupted by intrusive thoughts or if they are socially withdrawn, then they are likely to struggle with the level of cognitive processing that fluent reading demands.
The dynamic qualities of fluent reading are summarised by Clay here,
“When the reading is phrased as in spoken language and the responding is quite fast, then there is a fair chance that the reader has grouped together the words that the author has meant to go together….If the reader can do this easily then he attends to the letters, and the words, and the grammar ‘on the run’ and as a result he can give more attention to the messages.” (Clay, 2005, p.150)
From a rhythm-based perspective, the key words in this quotation are ‘attends’ and ‘attention’. The child’s capacity to sustain their attention determines the fluency of their reading. Attention is the cognitive ‘fuel’ necessary to ‘drive’ this fluency and to extract the author’s ‘message’ from the alignment of the letters, words and phrases as units of meaning.
For a fragile reader, reading ’on the run’ could describe a single layer of fast-moving unrelated syllables and words that do not generate meaning as they are read. Many children can read fast and yet they do not process words within well-defined phrases and therefore do not assimilate meaning from their reading.
For a fluent reader however, reading ‘on the run’ would describe fast-moving syllables, words, and phrases that are grammatically and rhythmically aligned, and the message they convey is assimilated without additional effort.
Dynamic attending and language
When children process spoken language with ease and fluency, we must remember that this happens in the context of a social dynamic. The child takes into account the speaker, the context and the sounds of the language. This social dimension adds a lot of information. We could say that the speech stream is ‘gift-wrapped’ for the child. These outer layers of the sound spectrum convey three key signals about context of the message:
- The relevance of the content capturing the child’s attention through curiosity or urgency.
- The emotional content in the speaker’s voice reassuring or unsettling their sense of safety.
- The rise and fall of intonation in the speaker’s voice and an emphasis on certain words helping them to process the context and content of the message ‘on the run’.
All of these outer layers of the speech stream are conveyed through the tone, timbre and rhythm of the speaker’s voice, and allow the child to feel the safety of their environment.
A child’s auditory environment is mapped out in utero from nineteen weeks gestational age and the home language is assimilated in an infant’s first year. Their emotional responses to the sounds of the care-giving environment are imprinted upon their nervous system, and embedded through a process called myelination. Myelin is a protective fatty coating that insulates nerve fibres and allows the information travelling along these fibres to move at lightning speed. The more these pathways are used, the faster they become.
The observations made by Marie Clay elude to this,
“It seems likely that if the learner develops faster responses racing around the neural circuits in his brain this will make reading more effective….” (Clay, 2005, p.151)
The emotional content of language processing has received little attention, though academics have studied the phonological, grammatical and semantic content of spoken language in depth. The ethical considerations when recruiting or identifying children with affective disorders relating to early childhood adversity are challenging, but studies of children in the care system and orphanages provide evidence of their difficulties with attention and reading. And of course, it is well-established that a warm, caring and sensitive environment in early childhood predicts strong educational attainment.
Reading Recovery
In Marie Clay’s original Reading Recovery programme (consisting of twenty ‘book levels’) there is an emphasis on the importance of a reading lesson every day for the children and she herself observed that a process of consolidation from one day to the next was important.
“If the child moves forward slowly, possibly missing lessons here and there, the end result is not as satisfactory as speedy progress through the book levels. It is as if the brain cells need to be involved tomorrow in what they explored today to consolidate some permanent change in their structure. This is a possible explanation.” (Clay, 2005, p.151)
Drilling into this a little further, if we consider the social dynamic between the specialist teacher and the child as a ‘dyad’ (an emotional pairing), then the continuity from one day to the next becomes more relevant in terms of the bond that accumulates from day to day and it is not surprising that the cumulative progress is described by Clay as ‘advantageous’.
Using the lens of child development, research conducted by Clay’s contemporaries Kuhn and Stahl (2003) showed that reading fluency was not limited to word recognition. The study concluded that among children in the first and second year of school, reading fluency was characterised by the prosodic features of language, which the authors defined as: rhythm, expression and perception of the boundaries of phrases in speech and text.
Phrases and fluency
From a rhythm-based perspective, the expressive element of fluent reading is underpinned by the temporal structure of clearly defined phrase boundaries. When the phrase boundaries are well-defined, the rhythm of the narrative ebbs and flows - good storytelling also has this wavelike motion of tension and release. Of course, a child listening to a story is mesmerised by the rhythmic features of the language and the expressive flow of the narrator’s voice. There are also peripheral signals that are a valuable part of holding a child’s attention: the stillness and poise of the narrator’s posture establish an atmosphere of trust, whereas their animated face and gestures, use of silence and the expressive qualities of their voice all contribute to the ‘suspension of belief’, which help to bring the events of the story to life.
It is interesting that using a rhythm-based approach to boost reading fluency requires a tiny fraction of the time taken by Reading Recovery. As a small group intervention that only requires ten minutes per week, in the Rhythm for Reading programme, the children are out of the classroom for only one hundred minutes across the entire course, and yet they experience a deep and meaningful shift in their ability to process printed language at the level of the phrase. Word accuracy also improves because the context of the words becomes clearer.
If you would like to read about the impact of the programme on different schools and children, click here. And to read more about fluency, here are links to related posts.
What can we do to support the development of reading fluency?
All children from all backgrounds need to learn to read fluently so that they can enjoy learning and fully embrace the curriculum offered by their school. A key challenge for schools is identifying an appropriate intervention that effectively supports reading fluency. This is a necessary part of a coherently planned, ambitious and inclusive curriculum that should meet the needs of all children.
Reading fluency again - looking at prosody
Prosody is closely associated with skilled reading, being integral to fluency and a predictor of achievement in reading accuracy and comprehension. Prosody is not taught, but it is a naturally occurring feature of competent reading. The words on the page may be arranged in horizontal lines, but a good reader transcends the visual appearance of the words, allowing them to take on a natural, flexible and speech-like quality.
Many teachers and head teachers have remarked on the improvement in their pupils’ reading fluency, so it seemed important to try to capture what has been happening. Of course, there are different ways to define and to measure reading fluency, but here is a snapshot of what we found when using two types of assessment.
Reading fluency: Reading, fast or slow?
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.
References
Clay, M.M (2005) Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals: Part Two Teaching Procedures, New Zealand, Heinemann Education.
Kuhn, M.R. and Stahl, S. (2003) Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 1: 3-21.
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