by Barclay Marcell
“Will you be timing me?” third grader Brad asks with trepidation. When the teacher nods her assent, the 8-year-old takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and clutches his Magic Tree House book as if preparing for an athletic competition.
“OK, I’m ready now,” he bravely asserts.
The stopwatch clicks and off he goes.
In an adjacent room, second grader Moira is reading aloud. Fast. Suddenly, mid-sentence, her eyes dart furtively to the jumping numbers on the teacher’s stopwatch. But just as quickly, seeming to regret this strategic move, her eyes return to the page. Nothing will stop her. Not periods. Not those annoying numbers at the end of every line.
“Henry and Henry’s big dog Mudge saw a 13 sign in the store window it said snowman contest 22 Saturday at the park.” The stopwatch beeps and Moira finally draws in a breath.
“How’d I do?” both Brad and Moira ask eagerly. “Did I beat my last score? Can I see my graph?”
Think these are exaggerated examples of what timed readings look like? Think again. Fluency is the skill of the hour. It made the most recent “What’s Hot” list on Jack Cassidy’s annual survey of literacy leaders, while also receiving a reinforcing “Should Be Hot” designation.
Open any current teacher’s catalog and you’ll find multiple pages devoted to research-based products guaranteed to improve fluency. There’s even a new market for specialized stopwatches and Palm Pilot applications.
The stakes are high. In a growing number of schools, fluency measurements are regularly administered in order to identify children who are falling behind. In addition, progress monitoring is performed on a weekly basis to ensure that intervention practices are effective in addressing targeted deficits. It’s all about increasing those words-per-minute scores.
This focus on fluency’s a good thing, right? After all, the ability to read with appropriate speed and intonation is certainly a key reading component that should undoubtedly be measured and taught. Indeed, a choppy reader who has to devote cognitive energy toward decoding strategies and sight word retrieval cannot effectively monitor his or her comprehension.
However, let’s examine what’s actually taking place in some classrooms where teachers are forced to click stopwatches during large segments of their all-too-brief instructional time. Perhaps the pendulum has swung off course. For if you ask Brad and Moira about the main ideas in their 100-word passages, they may just look at you quizzically and ask, “Didn’t we sound good? Weren’t we faster than before?”
As a teacher of struggling readers, I believe that if we continue to focus on fluency in such an isolated manner, we run the risk of actually creating word-callers—NASCAR readers, if you will, who care little about the scenery along the side of the road—missing the comprehension piece, which gives reading its meaning, through visualizing, predicting, connecting, and clarifying. Moira and Brad need more than repeated readings and color-coordinated graphs. They need to attend to characters and settings, problems and solutions, predictions and connections.
So where do we go from here? How about routinely including comprehension-enhancing tools into fluency tasks? Here are some ideas I have implemented effectively right along with my stopwatch. They may serve to remove fluency from the driver’s seat and let comprehension take the wheel!
Even though the progress monitoring passage is from a fluency website, and the subject is laundry detergent, it’s important to set a purpose for reading. After considering the title, therefore, take a moment to solicit prior knowledge from your student along with at least one “I wonder...,” followed by a “Let’s read to find out...” After reading, have the student answer the purpose-setting question—kind of a mini-KWL, albeit not as Donna Ogle envisioned, but one that underscores reading as foremost a meaning-making process.
Here’s another idea. Why not incorporate summarizing into a fluency measurement task? Tell the student that he will be asked to identify the Big Ideas of the passage. After reading, have the student cover the passage and ask audibly and with great drama, “WHAT did I just read?” Ask him then to raise a hand and pretend to “write” a main idea sentence in his palm (e.g. “The sun is a ball of fiery gases.”). After this, two or three details are identified by raising fingers accordingly. (“It is 6,000 times as hot as an oven.”)
A reader who makes personal connections is one who understands the text at hand. But how do you encourage implementation of this strategy when the passage concerns the invention of the stapler? I suggest you produce a handful of paperclips. Simplistic? Yes, but surprisingly, if you play a fishing game with your clips, trying to connect them (à la “Barrel of Monkeys”) while making connections, your kids will be hooked. Literally.
But, apart from these gimmicks, let’s return to the issue at hand. Who’s driving this vehicle anyway? I say, let’s keep comprehension at the wheel and relegate fluency to the back seat. Fluency can take the role of the ever-helpful passenger, making sure that speed limits are adhered to—that oral reading doesn’t exceed the posted limit, that the car does not sputter, that stop signs (periods) and yield signs (commas) are monitored. But beyond that, fluency can take a snooze! Because when comprehension is driving, our destination is secure and the sightseeing along the way, well, it’s memorable. It’s the ride of your life!
Barclay Marcell is an academic achievement teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois, USA.
Fluent to a fault: Put fluency in the passenger seat and let comprehension take the wheel! (June 2007). Reading Today, 24(6), 18.
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