Reading 101: What Teachers and Parents Should Know About (Part V)

Understanding and Assessing Fluency
By: Jan Hasbrouck (2006)

Learn what reading fluency is, why it is critical to make sure that students have sufficient fluency, how we should assess fluency, and how to best provide practice and support for all students.

Fluency is the ability to read text with accuracy, appropriate rate, and good expression (NICHD, 2000) is widely accepted among fluency researchers, these experts continue to debate the more subtle aspects of fluency (Stecker, Roser, and Martinez, 1998; Wolf and Katzir-Cohen, 2001). However it is defined, this much is certain: Fluency is necessary, but not sufficient*, for understanding the meaning of text. When children read too slowly or haltingly, the text devolves into a broken string of words and/or phrases; it's a struggle just to remember what's been read, much less extract its meaning. So it's important that teachers determine if their students' fluency is at a level appropriate for their grade. If not, how should it be developed? If a student is appropriately fluent for her grade level, how does a teacher help maintain that student's fluency? And, how does a teacher make these determinations? This process begins with assessments of the component pieces of fluency: prosody, accuracy, and rate.

The exact role of expression and phrasing — or prosody — in fluency and comprehension has not yet been determined, but it certainly is one element that signifies whether or not a student is truly a fluent reader. To measure the quality of a student's reading prosody, some educators rely on the four-level scale first developed for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading (Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, and Oranje, 2005). This scale focuses on the level of skill a student demonstrates in phrasing and expression while reading aloud (see below). After listening to an individual student read aloud, the educator rates the student's reading according to the level that best describes the student's overall performance.

National Assessment of Educational Progress Fluency Scale

• Fluent    Level 4    Reads primarily in larger, meaningful phrase groups. Although some regressions, repetitions, and deviations from text may be present, these do not appear to detract from the overall structure of the story. Preservation of the author's syntax is consistent. Some or most of the story is read with expressive interpretation.
• Fluent    Level 3    Reads primarily in three- or four-word phrase groups. Some small groupings may be present. However, the majority of phrasing seems appropriate and preserves the syntax of the author. Little or no expressive interpretation is present.
• Non-Fluent    Level 2    Reads primarily in two-word phrases with some three- or four-word groupings. Some word-by-word reading may be present. Word groupings may seem awkward and unrelated to larger context of sentence or passage
• Non-Fluent    Level 1    Reads primarily word-by-word. Occasional two-word or three-word phrases may occur but these are infrequent and/or they do not preserve meaningful syntax.

A checklist developed by Hudson, Lane and Pullen (2005, p. 707) provides a more detailed assessment of a student's prosody:

1. Student placed vocal emphasis on appropriate words.
2. Student's voice tone rose and fell at appropriate points in the text. 
3. Student's inflection reflected the punctuation in the text (e.g., voice tone rose near the end of a question). 
4. In narrative text with dialogue, student used appropriate vocal tone to represent characters' mental states, such as excitement, sadness, fear, or confidence. 
5. Student used punctuation to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries. 
6. Student used prepositional phrases to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries. 
7. Student used subject-verb divisions to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.  
8. Student used conjunctions to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

Although most researchers consider prosody important, the subjectivity of judging students' prosody makes it a difficult component of fluency to study. Many researchers have focused on the more easily quantifiable components of fluency (rate and accuracy) and, therefore, some basic questions about prosody — like what should be expected in second grade versus sixth grade — have not been answered. Nevertheless, students' prosody is an extra piece of information for making instructional decisions. When students' speed and accuracy are at appropriate levels, reading with proper phrasing, expression, and intonation should be the next goal.

To measure students' oral reading speed and accuracy, researchers have developed a simple and very brief procedure that uses regular classroom texts to determine the number of words that students can read correctly in one minute. To obtain a words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) score,students are assessed individually as they read aloud for one minute from an unpracticed passage of text.

To calculate the WCPM score, the examiner subtracts the total number of errors from the total number of words read in one minute. An error includes any word that is omitted, mispronounced, or substituted for another word. Words transposed in a phrase count as two errors (e.g., reading "laughed and played" instead of "played and laughed"). Each time a word is read incorrectly it is counted as an error. Words read correctly that are repeated more than once, errors self-corrected by the student, words inserted by the student that do not appear in the text, and words mispronounced due to dialect or speech impairments are not counted as errors. They do, however, impact the final score since they slow the student down and, therefore, reduce the number of words that are read correctly in one minute (Shinn, 1989).

If the passage is randomly selected from a text or trade book, an average score should be taken from readings of two or three different passages to account for any text-based differences. If standardized passages are used (in which the text has been carefully controlled for difficulty), a score from a single passage may be sufficient (Hintze and Christ, 2004). Standardized passages can be found in the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills-DIBELS (Good and Kaminski, 2002), the Reading Fluency Benchmark (Read Naturally, 2002), or Edformation's AIMSWeb materials.

To determine if the student's score is on target, the examiner compares it to the oral reading fluency norms (see Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring: The Details). It's critical to understand that a WCPM score can be an alarm bell, a canary in a coal mine. If the WCPM is very low, the student is not sufficiently fluent and an intervention is merited. However, a low WCPM score may be the result of weak fluency skills or other reading weaknesses, for example, in decoding, vocabulary, sight words, etc.— so administering some diagnostic assessments may be necessary to determine exactly what type of intervention a student needs.

The canary in the coal mine

With all the assessments schools are required to administer as a result of No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and numerous statewide and district initiatives, some educators are concerned about over-testing students. (In the Philippines, we call it SREA, PHIL-IRI, NAT III and VI, etc.)  They ask: "How can we justify spending so much precious instructional time testing our students over and over again?" This concern is certainly legitimate. The purpose of having our students in school is to teach them, not to test them. However, as professional educators, it is imperative that we make decisions about the instruction we provide our students based on the best information available.  So tests that are yearly and by-semester requirement should not only be treated as mere school, district, division, or region requirement but basis of all teachers’ actions.

The WCPM procedure just described is an extremely time-efficient and reliable way to track students' fluency — and their overall reading ability. While it may be surprising that a one-minute assessment can be so informative, WCPM has been shown, in both theoretical and empirical research, to serve as an accurate and powerful indicator of overall reading competence — especially through its strong correlation with comprehension. Its validity and reliability have been well established in a body of research extending over the past 25 years (Fuchs et al., 2001; Shinn, 1998).

The relationship between WCPM and comprehension has been found to be stronger in the elementary and junior high grades than in older students (Fuchs et al., 2001), likely due to the fact that as a reader matures, competent reading involves more complex skills, vocabulary, and knowledge (and thus any single measure becomes less predictive of general reading competence as a student develops).

Teachers can and should use WCPM as their canary in the coal mine-their first indicator that all may not be well with their students' reading ability.** In first through fifth grade, WCPM should be used to screen all students, help to diagnose a possible cause of struggling students' problems, and to monitor the progress of struggling students who are receiving additional support.

Reading 101: What Parents and Teachers Should Know About (Part IV)

The Phive Phones of Reading
By: Sebastian Wren (2002)

Who can understand all the jargon that's being tossed around in education these days? Consider all the similar terms that have to do with the sounds of spoken words – phonics, phonetic spelling, phoneme awareness, phonological awareness, and phonology – all of them share the same "phon" root, so they are easy to confuse, but they are definitely different, and each, in its way, is very important in reading education.


Phonics

Phonics is a method of teaching that emphasizes letter-sound relationships. Children are taught, for example, that the letter n represents the sound /n/, and that it is the first letter in words such as nose, nice and new.

For the purpose of discussion, there are two important things to remember about phonics. First and foremost, phonics is an instructional strategy – a method of teaching children to read. Second, phonics has to do with teaching the relationships between the sounds in speech and the letters of the alphabet (both written and spoken. Learning that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters allows children to apply these relationships to both familiar and unfamiliar words, and to begin to read with fluency.

The goal of phonics instruction is to help children to learn and be able to use the Alphabetic Principle. The alphabetic principle is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Phonics instruction helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language.


Phonetic Spelling or Reading

This is a concept which is related to phonics, but unlike phonics, which is a method of teaching reading, phonetic spelling or phonetic reading is a behavior that young readers exhibit when they are trying to write or read. When children spell words the way they sound, they are said to be phonetically spelling – for example, the word lion could be phonetically spelled L-Y-N, or the word move could be phonetically spelled M-U-V. Likewise, a child can phonetically read words – child phonetically reading the word two may say "twah", or the child may phonetically read the word laugh in such a way that it sounds like lag or log.


Phonology

Unlike phonics or phonetic reading and writing, phonology has nothing to do with the letters in our alphabet or the letter names (spoken or written. Phonology has to do with the ability to distinguish and categorize sounds in speech. Some words in English (in all languages actually) sound very similar, and are easily confused if you are not very sensitive to the distinctions. For some children with phonology deficits, pairs of words like mauve and moth or rate and late sound identical. They can not hear the difference between certain similar phonemes (speech sounds), and as a consequence, they can not hear the difference between certain words.


Phonological Awareness

Like phonology, phonological awareness has nothing to do with the letters in our alphabet – it has to do with the sounds in spoken words. And while phonology refers to the ability to hear the difference between sounds in spoken words, phonological awareness refers to the child's understanding that spoken words are made up of sounds.

This fact is obvious to adults, but children do not usually realize that, within a word, there may be other words (in the case of compound words), or that words are made up of syllables and that syllables are made up of phonemes. Children without phonological awareness do not understand what it means for words to rhyme, they do not appreciate alliteration (words that start with the same sound), and they do not understand that some words are longer than other words (the spoken form, that is, not necessarily the written form – the word area in its spoken form is longer than the word though, but in its written form, area is the shorter word).


Phoneme Awareness

The phoneme is the basic building block for spoken words. In English, for example, there are an infinite number of possible words, but there are only about 45 phonemes. To make new words, we just delete or rearrange the phonemes – mat becomes man when the phoneme /t/ is replaced with the phoneme /n/, and deleting the phoneme /m/ from man leaves you with the word an.
 
While phonological awareness is a general term describing a child's awareness that spoken words are made up of sounds, phoneme awareness is a specific term that falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Phoneme awareness refers to the specific understanding that spoken words are made up of individual phonemes – not just sounds in general (which would include syllables, onsets, rimes, etc.). Children with phoneme awareness know that the spoken word bend contains four phonemes, and that the words pill and map both contain the phoneme /p/; they know that phonemes can be rearranged and substituted to make different words.

Phonological awareness is a step in the right direction, but phoneme awareness is what is necessary for the child to understand that the letters in written words represent the phonemes in spoken words (what we call the "alphabetic principle"). We spend a lot of time teaching children that the letter M stands for the sound /m/, but we rarely make sure that children understand that words like milk, ham and family all contain the phoneme /m/, or that the difference between man and an is the deletion of the phoneme /m/.

Phoneme awareness can be demonstrated in a variety of ways. The easiest phoneme awareness task is called blending – an adult pronounces a word with a pause between each phoneme (e.g. /b/ /a/ /l/), and the child blends the phonemes together to make the word ("ball"). A more challenging assessment for children is the reverse, called phoneme segmentation – the adult says the whole word, and the child says the word with pauses between the phonemes (adult says "ball," child says /b/ /a/ /l/). Even more challenging is phoneme manipulation – the adult tells the child to say a word without a particular phoneme (say "boat" without the /t/), or the adult tells the child to add a phoneme to a word to make a new word (What word would you have if you added the phoneme /o/ to the beginning of "pen?"). If the child can reliably do any of these tasks, the child has demonstrated true phoneme awareness, but a relevant point to make here is that the child doesn't need to do much more than these tasks to demonstrate phoneme awareness.

It is possible, in fact it is easy, to create phoneme awareness tasks that are exceptionally tricky, but these should be avoided rather than exploited. English contains many confusing phonemes – there are diphthongs and glides that can confuse anybody, even mature, experienced readers (How many phonemes do you hear in pay?), and there are odd phonemes that are not universally defined (How many phonemes are in the word ring or fur?), and there are clusters of phonemes that are harder to segment than other phonemes (a cluster is a group of consonants that are perceived as a unit, sometimes until the child begins spelling – for example, the /pr/ in pray, the /gl/ in glow, and the /sk/ in school). It is important for the teacher to remember that the child doesn't need to be an Olympic champion at phoneme manipulation – the child just needs to demonstrate knowledge of the fact that spoken words are made up of phonemes. It is also important that the teacher understands that phoneme awareness is not a magic bullet; it is important, and it is necessary for reading success, but it is only one skill of many that support literacy.


Summary

So to recap, phonics is an instructional approach that emphasizes the letter-sound relationships (which letters represent which sounds). Phonetic reading and writing is a behavior the child exhibits that involves "sounding out" words the way they are written or writing words the way they sound (again, relating to the way letters represent speech sounds). Phonology has to do with the ability to hear the difference between different speech sounds (and has nothing to do with letters of the alphabet). Phonological awareness is a term used to describe the child's generic understanding that spoken words are made up of sounds. Phoneme awareness specifically refers to a child's knowledge that the basic building blocks of spoken words are the phonemes.

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