Building reading fluency in a learning-disabled middle school reader

Morris, Darrell, & Gaffney, Meghan. (2011). Building reading fluency in a learning-disabled middle school reader. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(5), 331-341.

Fluency is a construct about which I seem to be seeing more misconceptions than I do about any other literacy-related topic. I worry mightily about the literacy development of “Luke”, a severely learning-disabled lad, who experienced a year of focused literacy interventions involving a heavy dose of repeated readings during twice-weekly tutoring sessions with a graduate student tutor (the second author). Here, “fluency” is defined as words read per minute. Why do people continue to equate fluency with reading rate? Of course, an excessively slow rate is a problem, and should be dealt with. But fluency is so much more! It is about expression, and about understanding and connecting with what you read. There is mention here of expression and phrasing as important aspects of fluency, but as far as I can tell, all the assessments of Luke’s fluency were couched in terms of words per minute, which is purely a measure of reading rate. As we have seen in many assessments in the post-NCLB era, a complex process like fluent reading is once again reduced to a simplistic, easily captured number. By assessing children’s reading in such simplistic ways, we are not so subtly teaching children to think about reading in the same simplistic ways. That is, if we count the number of words read per minute, and if we make decisions based on such a limited piece of data, we are teaching children that good reading is fast reading. Good readers are NOT always the fastest readers. Good readers read with understanding. Good readers monitor their understanding, and they stop and reread and self-correct when what they read does not make sense. Good readers read with expression. Good readers enjoy reading and want to read more. Those things may all mean reading more slowly than one possibly can. Apparently, Luke does read with comprehension (I’ll choose to accept the authors’ operational definition of that for now, even though I’ll wager they equated “reading with comprehension” with the ability to answer low-level questions about a text), but that is not examined deeply or focused on here. He did increase his reading rate by 25 words per minute in the course of one year, though his rate is still low, and he is still reading at the fourth grade level at the end of seventh grade. Did he increase his expression and phrasing as he increased his rate? Did he “read” non-words without correcting them? Did he self-correct at all? Most importantly, did he build his motivation to read? Something just seemed hollow to me as I read this, and I found myself craving some qualitative data to see what Luke was really doing as he read. Miscue analysis procedures, or even some form of running record, would provide some really useful information about this boy, much more useful than the number of words read per minute. I also really wanted to hear Luke’s voice here, and that was almost totally missing from this account; all we learn about him as a reader is that he prefers reading biographies and history books. How does Luke perceive reading, and himself as a reader? What is his honest response to the repeated readings, especially as he enters his teens, and these techniques begin to seem less and less age-appropriate? How did he feel about giving up two days a week of after-school time for a whole year to these activities? What will happen as Luke enters a less sympathetic high school environment still reading several years below grade level? The challenges Luke faces are more complicated than just a slow reading rate, and solutions must go deeper than just boosting the number of words read per minute.