Putting fluency on a fitness plan: Building fluency’s meaning-making muscle

Marcell, Barclay (2011). Putting fluency on a fitness plan: Building fluency’s meaning-making muscle. The Reading Teacher, 65(4), 242-249.

This balanced, sensible look at fluency, that controversial “pillar” of reading, comes from an elementary school literacy teacher. It’s a concise, useful piece that covers the history of the emphasis on fluency, including the development of the research base on repeated readings, the problems with current forms of fluency assessments, and some possible ways of getting beyond seeing fluency as only its most quantifiable aspects (speed and accuracy) and making sure the aspects of fluency related to meaning-making (expression and especially comprehension) receive their proper emphasis. Marcell does not recommend throwing out the current literacy assessments that stress only speed and accuracy, as some of those who oppose fluency assessments propose; such assessments are presented here as having usefulness as a screening device, when they are augmented by additional assessments of expression and comprehension.

Marcel proposes an acronym, REAL (Rate, Expression, Accuracy, Learning), and presents two specific assessment tools based upon that acronym. The first tool is a “student-friendly” rubric designed to help students self-assess their fluency on all four fluency aspects (I’m thinking this would be a good tool for teachers and students to use collaboratively). The second tool, called Repeated Readings Revisited, is designed to take repeated readings a few steps further than is often the case, that is, to give them more “meaning-making muscle” than just having students read through a passage orally and looking at correct words per minute. The tool takes readers to higher levels of comprehension on each successive reading. The first reading is for main ideas and details, the second reading is for understanding the author’s purpose and paraphrasing main ideas, and the third and final reading is for telling what the reader found most interesting and why, evaluating the title, and indentifying the author’s intentions. The Repeated Readings Revisited tool does have places to record correct words per minute, but it puts those aspects of fluency in their proper place. Comprehension is the bottom line of reading, and that is clearly illustrated here.

This article sounds like the “voice of reason” on fluency to me, and I hope many classroom teachers and literacy specialists will read it and try what Marcel suggests. The article, short as it is, covers a lot of important ground and is written in an engaging and accessible style. Because Marcel weaves in classroom vignettes that will resonate for many teachers, the article has authenticity and credibility. Yet even though this is an article aimed at practitioners, Marcel’s well-grounded, clearly narrated chronicle of the timeline of research on fluency and repeated readings makes this article credible for researchers and teacher educators as well.

A few concerns arose for me as I read. First, I wondered a little about the “student-friendly” rubric, especially the descriptions for students who are not meeting expectations. Although I believe we must level with students about whether or not they are meeting learning goals (they know anyway), I think some of the wording here might be a bit discouraging for some of the most challenged readers. I could be hypersensitive about this, and many learners might be fine with this wording, but I know children who might have hurt feelings if words like “weird” or “flat” were used to describe their reading. I’d probably make a few tweaks on the wording before using this tool with children.

My other concern is that one of the reasons the typical fluency assessments that count correct words per minute are so popular is that they only take a minute to administer. I worry that teachers and administrators will not want to change the “quick and dirty” but easily quantifiable assessments for those that may take longer and won’t provide numbers and so-called “objectivity.” Let’s face it: If you also assess expression and comprehension as Marcell suggests, that is going to take more time and be a bit less quantitative than only counting correct words per minute. Don’t get me wrong—I think it SHOULD take more than a minute, and with the high stakes placed on fluency assessments these days, assessments really need to look at fluency in its entirety rather than just looking at things that can be quickly and easily counted. Even more importantly, we need to stop teaching children that reading fast and pronouncing words are all there is to reading. As Marcell so convincingly points out, we need to stop sending mixed messages to children about reading. Children will quickly pick up that what is assessed is what is valued in school; assessing only rate and accuracy while also teaching that reading strategies and meaning-making are important may be even worse than sending mixed messages. It may be sending a very clear and definite message about what is REALLY valued, while at the same time teaching that what adults SAY is not important if something different is what actually counts. In sum, I am all for making the changes Marcell suggests, but I worry that quick and quantitative assessments are so seductive in today’s accountability-charged schools that it may be difficult for some educators to let go of them.

The above concerns, however, do not dim my appreciation of this article. I definitely plan to share it with the future teachers in my own preservice literacy education courses, and maybe with my literacy study group. Articles in recent issues of this journal have begun including some nice extras that are helpful for those of us involved in teacher education and professional development, namely, the sidebars “Pause and Ponder” which provides some pithy discussion/reflection prompts, “Take Action!” which suggests ways to link theory/research with practice, and “More to Explore” which provides some resources for those who want to learn more. These sidebars are particularly apt for this article, and combined with Barclay’s assessment tools, form a real “keeper” of an article with a lot of meat in a few pages.