Fluency in Reading

Question: What is wrong with today’s concentration on fluency?

Answer/Quote: “Reading fluency has become a speed reading contest and divorced from the essence of reading—comprehension.”

Quote: “Reading fluency is the critical link from word recognition to comprehension. Reading fluency instruction must be focused on the making of meaning. If fluency instruction continues to be an instructional quest for faster and faster reading, as is currently evidenced by instructional mandates from educational entities and instructional methods and materials from publishers, then reading fluency should not be a hot topic. Indeed, it is not even reading fluency.”

Quote: “The importance of speed should be minimized in the fluency debate. Reading requires a level of active awareness and thought about language which diminishes when reading speed is emphasized. Reading at an appropriate rate in meaningful phrases, with prosody and comprehension, should be the fluency goal for all readers. A literate person is one who derives meaning, not speed from the printed word.”

Note: Prosody refers to expression that conveys meaning. RayS.

 Comment: Somebody has to find something to “debate” in order to keep the publishing wheels turning. I guess an overemphasis on speed is a concern with fluency. RayS.

Title: “Fluency: Why It Is ‘Not Hot.’” Timothy Rasinski and Pamela Hamman. Reading Today (August/September 1910), 26.