The Fluency Fallacy
By Maryann Manning

The first time I thought about reading with fluency was as a child listening to adults read aloud at church. I noticed that some people read in a manner that was a pleasure to hear and others sounded labored. As a child, I didn't realize that some of the adults with terrible-sounding oral expression were actually good readers who had excellent comprehension skills.

Today, I'm concerned about what I consider to be an over-emphasis on fluency and what I perceive as confusion about what fluency is and how it should be developed. While many excellent readers are fluent oral readers, fluency does not have a causal relationship with comprehension. Many students believe the goal of reading is to read faster and faster because reading rate is being confused with fluency and the importance of comprehension has fallen to the wayside.

Falling into patterns
Every summer, I test hundreds of children who are having trouble reading. Year after year, I see the same things happening:

• I listen to a student who seems to be reading age-appropriate or above text, has no miscues and uses lots of expression. During retelling, however, the student remembers almost nothing about what he has read or has a number of misconceptions about the meaning of the text.
• I listen to a child who skips most of the multi-syllabic words. When I ask her why she does that, she replies, "If I stop to think about a word, I slow down and don't read as many words in a minute. When I skip the words I don't know, I have a higher number before the minute is up."
• Other students have excellent comprehension skills and read beyond what is considered age-appropriate text, but with pauses. When I ask the children what they need to do to be better readers, they respond, "Read fluently." When I ask what that means, they say their teachers or parents want them to read faster. Some children even cite a specific score or benchmark as a reason why they're not "good" readers.

Comprehension is king
As a reading teacher, I do want my students to read in a fluent manner and I want my classroom practices to develop smooth oral reading. However, I want no classroom practice to interfere with my main goal, which is for my students be able to comprehend what they read. From my experience with round-robin reading, I realized students can read aloud so often that they sub-vocalize and become incapable of reading silently. Therefore, a goal of my teaching is for students to become excellent silent readers who can retell what they have read. I want to remember:

• I should be the most fluent reader in the classroom and should demonstrate fluency when I read aloud.
• Thoughtful readers don't always read fast. Thinking takes time.
• Within a text, a reader will read at different paces according to the conceptual difficulty of the text, the familiarity of the vocabulary and the reason for reading.
• Fluent readers self-correct words and phrases as they self-monitor (mental recognition that they have altered the meaning of the text).
• Fluent readers repeat words and phrases to grapple with meaning.
• Some good silent readers may not be fluent in oral reading and I must remind myself that not everyone must be a fluent oral reader.
• Sustained silent reading supports the development of fluency.

Fluency activities that work
Here are strategies and activities that have authentic reasons for inclusion in my reading/language arts curriculum.

Oral reading by the teacher – As the most fluent reader in the room, the way you read aloud influences your students. After you finish reading, students may want to reread paragraphs aloud. They'll probably be trying to sound like you.

Repeated readings – Reading the same text several times during shared and guided reading, with the teacher or in small groups, encourages flow.

Reading the walls – Younger children enjoy reading poems, student-produced texts and other text posted on the walls or on the overhead projector. You can provide fun pointers and silly eyeglasses for reading the walls.

Choral reading – The age-old practice of reading poems and music texts together is enjoyable. Try Paul Fleischman's books Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices (HarperCollins, 1992, ISBN: 0-064-46093-2), I Am Phoenix: Poems for Two Voices (Harper Trophy, 1989, ISBN: 0-064-46092-4) and Big Talk: Poems for Four Voices (Candlewick, 2000, ISBN: 0-7636-0636-7) as well as Mary Ann Hoberman's You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Stories to Read Together (Little, Brown, 2004, ISBN: 0-316-36350-2).

Readers theater – There are wonderful scripts available for different curriculum areas. Students learn content and engage in oral reading in the hope that an audience will understand them.

Echo reading – To assist students who are having difficulties, a teacher, parent or older student can sit close to the reader's ear and read aloud while they both read from the same text.

Nursery rhymes – Repeating rhymes is a delightful way for younger children to practice reading fluently. For emergent readers, pointing at each word while reading helps to establish one-to-one correspondence between voice and printed word.

Read-alongs – Reading aloud with a recording is fun. Many authors have made recordings of themselves reading their own works.

Our students need to know that we value comprehension over speed of reading. Let's evaluate our practices that encourage fluency to insure that our main concern is whether our students understand what they read.

Maryann Manning is on the faculty of the School of Education, the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

November/December 2004, Vol.35, No.3