• 

  CREST | Research

  IES awards College researchers $4.8 million/5 years to create a new doctoral training program for educational scientists

  MORE

• 

  CIRGE | Research

  CIRGE has been busy: its 5-Years Out study drew wide attention and it has hosted three int'l workshops on PhD education...

  MORE

•  

Application Deadlines

Scholarships & Funding

Courses

At A Glance

Calendar

Giving

home > research > rtm_08

Research

That Matters

Two young children sit together, reading to each other as part of a buddy reading activity. The first child slides through sentences as she reads out loud. Many words are familiar: her, dress, play, yes. Unfamiliar words she automatically decodes, turning letters into sounds, sounds into words, words into meaning: “yes-ter-day.” She never thinks about the complex set of skills she is using. All of her literacy experiences at home, preschool, and kindergarten are falling nicely into place. This is fun, a riddle. Caught up in the story, she brings the page to life through changes in the pitch of her voice and phrasing, pausing for punctuation. Her reading appears effortless and fluent.

The second child struggles with the text, gets stuck, looks to her buddy for help. So many words are new, unknown. She tries to break them into the parts she has practiced — individual letters and their individual sounds, longer letter strings that have predictable sounds (eed, ack, ing) — but she has trouble going from the parts to the whole words and then to meaning. Her reading is slow, laborious, disconnected from content. She reads in a monotone, without expression, using awkward phrasings. She may interpret words incorrectly, go over them several times, or skip them entirely and misread the author’s message.

For her, reading is not fun, it’s hard work.

“The effort can be exhausting,” says UW College of Education researcher Roxanne Hudson, an assistant professor in special education who studies the complex layers of learning involved in young children’s reading fluency.

Hudson knows the topic first-hand, as a special-education teacher, a volunteer tutor and now as a researcher working with struggling, non-fluent readers. She witnesses the effort these children put into a task that can appear so effortless for fluent readers, and she knows how tempting it is for struggling readers to abandon that effort after the third or fourth try. “I think it is important for us to acknowledge that kids with reading problems work really hard,” says Hudson. “They stay motivated, engaged in things that are very, very difficult for them and continue doing so day after day.”

Reading fluency is often defined as reading accurately at a conversational rate with good expression. Fluency reflects the culmination of a child’s prior literacy experiences, but it also relates to future skill. An influential 2000 study by the National Reading Panel showed that fluency was strongly correlated with reading comprehension although whether fluency leads to comprehension or comprehension leads to fluency is unclear. Understanding the meaning of a paragraph will help a child read that paragraph more fluently, but when reading is slow and effortful, it is nearly impossible to understand what is being read. This strong relationship between fluency and comprehension has many researchers arguing that fluency instruction is too often neglected in the early elementary classroom.

That’s beginning to change across the country as educators and administrators — faced with statistics that show more than half of America’s fourth-graders don’t read at proficient levels — focus on integrating reading fluency into early-learning assessment and instruction. Fluency is not something all children develop on their own, and silent independent reading is not enough. “Independent reading practice will not help all struggling readers gain fluency,” says Hudson. “They need direct instruction in fluency and many opportunities to practice reading text at the right level with adult support.” Researchers recommend that preschool and kindergarten teachers model fluent reading extensively and primary teachers provide corrective feedback as students give regular, repeated oral readings of familiar text.

Hudson’s focus is early intervention. Kindergartners who have trouble naming letters and orally breaking words into sounds have increasing problems with reading as they move on, unable to build on these basic skills, unable to “grow out of it.”

“What if we can intervene early,” asks Hudson, “and keep most of these readers from developing a reading disability?”

Hudson is wrapping up Project WORD, a three-year research project. The first two years, she studied a wide range of readers in first through third grade to discover what skills and knowledge were important for proficient, fluent reading. “I wanted to learn what foundational skills really seemed to matter in early reading—meaning that if children had them, they were fluent, and when they didn’t, they weren’t,” says Hudson. She then used the information gained from these studies to develop an intervention designed to increase children’s fluency in these foundational areas — segmenting and blending of individual sounds within words, the sounds associated with individual letters and the longer letter strings that repeat across words.

In this third and last year, she is working with personnel in several Puget Sound schools and similar schools in Florida to test the intervention with second grade students who score in the lower third in oral reading fluency and are struggling in school. She chose this grade level for Project WORD because it is a critical age in learning to read fluently, when previously acquired skills should be coming together. Hudson’s collaborators include Holly Lane, University of Florida, and Joseph Torgesen of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University. Torgesen’s studies show intervention with focused instruction in kindergarten can produce fluent readers, but such intervention with third-graders has limited results: While it improved the third-graders’ reading accuracy to grade level, their fluency still lagged behind their peers.

“What that says is that we need to do more, and do it sooner,” concludes Hudson.
Early, accurate assessment is critical to diagnosing reading problems. While most state accountability tests can determine whether a child is a good reader or a poor reader, they can’t tell why, or where problems occur. “In order to manage the higher level skills and be fluent, children need to master the lower level processes that develop early, and teachers have to identify where those lower level processes aren’t working,” says Hudson.

One of the most effective tools for identifying fluency problems is timed oral reading. As individual students read selected passages across multiple occasions, teachers monitor words, read correctly and identify where problems occur. Is the problem with mapping letters to sounds? Blending sounds together to form recognizable words? In the number of words they can read instantly or by sight? In how they phrase what they read or represent meaning in what they read? All of these skills must be coordinated.

Important in developing children’s reading fluency is choosing appropriate materials in which they can practice their reading skills with some success. Children need to read text at the level just right for them. Too often, children are asked to read text that is too difficult. “We shouldn’t have children read a text unless they can correctly read at least 90 percent of the words,” says Hudson. “We don’t want them to read at their frustration level. It teaches them reading is not supposed to make sense, it’s just figuring out the words.”

Too many students get stuck at the “figuring out” stage, and the long-term results are sobering. Because reading is so laborious and they barely understand what they read, non-fluent readers often fail to complete school work, lose interest in school, and show little inclination to read for pleasure. The problem snowballs with each year, as texts become more difficult to decode, and slow reading turns one hour of homework into four.

“Children with reading fluency problems often get identified as having a reading disability, they tend to be unsuccessful in content area classes because they can’t read the textbook and eventually they can have motivational and behavioral problems,” says Hudson.

Can early research-based fluency instruction break this cycle? Hudson has witnessed what happens when instruction is effective. One of the second-grade students she worked with refused to sound out words or try to make meaning as she read aloud. She just looked for words she knew in the text and skipped the rest.

The text began: “Six years ago, my family grew from two people to four people in one day.”

The little girl read aloud: “…my…two…in…”

Hudson and her UW graduate students worked with the girl on recognizing the sounds of letters, practicing them until she was fluent and making her pay attention to every one on a page. They also worked on helping her decode word families with those same sounds, showing her how to sound out each letter and then blend them into words. The sentences started filling in.
One teacher finally stopped Hudson in the hall and asked, “What are you doing with her? I can’t believe how well she is reading.”

It was, says Hudson, a moment to savor.

More information about Hudson’s research can be found in:

Hudson, R. F., Lane, H. B., & Pullen, P. C. (2005). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how? The Reading Teacher, 58, 702-714.

Also, see Hudson’s website: www.fluentreader.org.