Fluency and Attention

The spelling knowledge you use to read is a bit like your ability to recognize objects in that you don’t need to consciously consider what things look like to recognize them. You don’t say to yourself, “Hmm, let’s see . . . there’s a paw, and that looks sort of like a muzzle, and that thing is probably a tail . . . this is shaping up to be a dog.” You just see a dog. And like your ability to recognize objects, your ability to visually recognize words includes being able to recognize pieces; even though you seldom encounter a dog’s paw in isolation, you would know that it’s a paw. Likewise, spelling representations in the mind can identify clumps of letters that you frequently see, even though they are typically part of a word. That’s why “fage” looks more like a word than “fajy.” The letter “j” is seldom followed by the letter “y,” but “ge” is a frequently encountered clump of letters.

Reading by spelling does allow you to differentiate homophones like “knight” and “night,” but there’s a much more important advantage: it’s faster and easier to use than the translation rules. Translation rules demand a lot of attention (symbolized by the radiating lines in figure 8.1). Just as the beginner driving a car must consciously think about how far to turn the steering wheel to change lanes, how closely he’s following the car ahead, and so on, the attention of the beginning reader is absorbed by sounding words out: “Let’s see, ‘o’ usually sounds like AW, but when there are two of them, ‘oo,’ they make a different sound . . . what was it again?” That makes it hard to focus on understanding the meaning of what she’s reading.

With experience, all of that thinking the driver had to do seems to disappear. Driving becomes automatic, and you can stay in your lane and keep the car at the correct speed without really thinking about it. That leaves your attention free to do something else: daydream or talk with a passenger, for example. In the same way, practice in reading reduces the attentional demand imposed by translation rules—reduces, but never completely eliminates. You can feel the small attentional cost yourself when you encounter an unfamiliar word and sound it out; for a short one like “fey,” the cost may be barely noticeable, but make the word long so that it really taxes the translation process, and you notice that your reading slows down. Try “triskaidekaphobia.”

In contrast, using word spellings to read requires very little attention, if any. You just see it in the same way you just see and recognize a dog. As your child gains reading experience, there is a larger and larger set of words that he can read using the spelling, and so his reading becomes faster, smoother, and more accurate. That’s called fluency.

Fluency and Prosody

It’s easy to see that fluency would aid comprehension. With sound translation demanding less attention, more attention can be paid to meaning. There’s a second, somewhat more subtle way that fluency helps comprehension. Fluency actually ends up helping comprehension through sound. Here’s how.

I mentioned prosody in chapter 2 when discussing “motherese.” You’ll recall that it’s the sort of melody of speech. We don’t speak in a monotone; words vary in pitch, pacing, and emphasis. This melody carries meaning. If I say, “What a great party,” with enthusiasm or with sarcasm, the words are the same. Only the prosody differs. Prosody helps you differentiate sarcasm from enthusiasm; it also helps with the essential but less glamorous donkey work of comprehension, namely, assigning grammatical roles to words (figure 8.2).

Even when you read silently, you add prosodic information to help you comprehend. Poet Billy Collins put it more eloquently: “I think when you’re reading in silence you actually hear the poem in your head because the skull is like a little auditorium.” If you’re reading fluently, access to individual words requires almost no attention, and that means you have more attention to devote to working out the prosody. Indeed, some research indicates that it is the development of prosody, and not the reading rate itself, that leads to the boost in reading comprehension associated with fluency (figure 8.3).

Fluency allows for better comprehension of what you read. And fluency depends on being able to read via spelling. So how do you learn to do that?

Learning to Read via Spelling

I start by clarifying what might have sounded like a contradiction. In chapter 5, I wrote, “It doesn’t work very well to teach reading by encouraging children to memorize what words look like. You have to teach the sound-translation rules.” Now I’m concluding that “reading by spelling is essential to good reading.” But these ideas don’t really contradict one another. Memorizing what words look like is impractical for learning to read, but once children know how to read, they teach themselves how to read via spelling.

Suppose I were trying to train a child to recognize words by their spellings. I might show her the word “dog” and tell her, “That word is dog.” Then I show her the word “log,” and tell her, “That word is log.” The child who can decode doesn’t need me to tell her the identity of each printed word. She tells herself. When she decodes a word using the sound mechanism, she’s identifying which word she’s seeing and she’s seeing the letter pattern at the same time. With enough repetitions, the spelling of the word and its identity come to be associated.

This is called the self-teaching hypothesis. Most kids are taught how to sound words out, but they teach themselves (without knowing they are doing so) what words look like, based on practice distributed over several years. It’s hard to give a firm estimate of exactly how long it takes to become a fluent reader. For one thing, fluency is graded. It’s not that you’re fluent or you’re not; it’s that your reading slowly becomes more and more fluent, so defining a time you’ve reached the goal is a little arbitrary. That said, the first stage of fluency is noticeable; there is some point at which a child seems to have turned a corner—she is no longer painstakingly sounding out each word but is instead reading. That might come after, say, six to nine months of decoding practice. And that’s another thing that makes it hard to come up with an estimate of when it will happen. It’s not the passage of time that’s crucial; it’s what’s happening during that time. Fluency will come faster or slower depending on how much reading the child does. The more frequently she encounters a word, the richer her knowledge of what it looks like.

Is There a Problem?

Before you consider your role in helping your child develop reading fluency, you need some sense of how it’s going. His school likely monitored reading closely in the early grades, but once he learned to decode fairly well, that monitoring probably tapered off. You too may have thought that the process of learning to read was pretty much done and that your child was all set. And now, when he’s older, if he seems to do his assigned reading and his teacher is satisfied, you wouldn’t have had much reason to question whether he’s a fluent reader.

You can get a sense of your child’s reading fluency by asking him to read aloud. Fluent reading will be expressive, whereas dysfluent reading will sound robotic, expressionless. The fluent reader will pause at places that sound natural, conversational. Dysfluent reading has pauses, but the reading sounds halting—you can hear that the reader is stuck on a word and is figuring it out. A fluent reader seldom loses his place while reading, and, when reading silently, he doesn’t move his mouth much. A dysfluent reader does both.

If his reading is dysfluent, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dyslexic. It probably means he needs more practice than other kids to develop fluency and hasn’t had it yet. And given that reading is effortful, he gets less pleasure from reading and therefore avoids it. That means practice is unlikely without a little push.

What Does a Dysfluent Reader Need?

Some parents I have known simply charged ahead and required that their child practice reading. If that’s you, the same approach I described in chapter 5 applies: brief daily sessions (five or ten minutes) with age-appropriate support and enthusiasm from you, along with a good dose of persistence to ensure that it happens. Some parents use a clever method to ensure practice; their child is allowed to watch thirty minutes of television each day but beyond that it can only be watched with the volume muted and closed captioning on.

If you take this direct route, it’s worth thinking about how you will talk to your child about the need for practice. Not many kids will respond well to a logical argument about the value of reading. Anything you might tell them, they already know. In fact, they know quite well that being a reader is associated with intelligence, and many will see their halting reading as evidence that they are just not that smart. (In fact, the opposite is probably true. Anyone who earns passing grades without being a strong reader probably has a good memory and reasons well.)

The point of reading practice is not the correction of a defect in your child. Rather, you are hoping to enrich her life. I think about reading much the way I think about food. Why don’t I let my child eat mostly mac-and-cheese and carrot sticks? Because even though she believes she’d be perfectly happy on that limited diet, I think that eating affords some of the most transcendent pleasures available. Of course, I want that for my child. In the same way, I want her to have access, through reading, to the greatest minds of history. A child who has long felt indifferent to reading won’t see it that way, but if you explain your motivation, she will at least understand that you are not criticizing her for some lack. Your goal is not for her to be a good reader; it’s that she enjoy reading.

The Indirect Route

I know some parents wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to get their teen to practice reading; how well that’s going to work obviously depends on your relationship and your history with your child. You can also try an indirect method with reading activities that demand less of her and are harder to say no to. These ideas won’t work for all families, but maybe one or two would work for yours.

You could try a family reading time once a week, in which each person reads silently together. Pitch it as a weekly time away from screens and with one another. If your child tries to show you that she doesn’t have to play along (perhaps by selecting baby books or catalogues), ignore it. She may actually be selecting books from early childhood both because she remembers them fondly and because they are easy to read. For this reason, don’t be quick to give away books your child has outgrown.

A related idea is to have the whole family listen together to an audiobook of mutual interest—and from there perhaps to one family member reading aloud to the others. Obviously the stated goal is not to practice reading. The motivation is that reading is pleasurable, spending time together as a family is pleasurable, and this is a way to do both. Time is always a problem, but even if you start with just fifteen minutes each week, that’s more than nothing, and the hope is that an interesting book will prompt some sessions to go longer. Needless to say, it’s a good idea to start with the most appealing book you can think of (figure 8.5). More on that in chapter 10.

You can also begin visits to the library even if you’ve never gotten into this habit before. If your child doesn’t want to go, tell him you need to go, and say that the most convenient time for you is during a trip to take him somewhere he needs to go.

It’s true that these reading scenarios are pretty contrived. You should also be on the lookout for times that it’s logical for your child to read. If there is a younger sibling in the house, that child should be read to: the older child might take that on. (She might also read to the children of friends who visit.) Such reading is a nice chance for your child to revisit favorites from childhood and perhaps awaken memories of reading that are more pleasant than the recent ones.

I find good opportunities for my children to read when one of them wants something. When our daughter wanted an aquarium, my wife and I said, “Okay, if you’re going to take care of it, you have to learn about them.” So she got a book and read up on aquaria. The same argument can be made for nearly anything: a tree house, a green belt in karate, or a driver’s license.

A rather sneaky motivator is this implicit bargain: “if my child is reading, I will do my utmost not to interrupt him.” That sounds natural, but if the principle extends to moments where you would typically ask the child’s help around the house, then it could become a useful motivator. Of course, it is essential that you not make this bargain explicit. It will be turned down, or you will end up quibbling about what sort of reading material “counts” or whether the chores were invented so as to persuade the child to read. If you leave it unstated, it may be a while before your child puts together what’s going on, and that leaves you with much better options for how to implement it.

For some students, a forceful external motivation to improve their reading pops up unexpectedly. I once met a high schooler who was an avid baseball player. Sophomore year he made varsity but not first string, and he concluded he probably could not make a living as a player. He started to think about coaching or perhaps working in the front office of a minor league team. He did some research and learned he was much more likely to get a job with a degree in sports management. More or less overnight he became keenly interested in academic work so he could go to college. He realized that some of the struggle was getting through his textbooks, so he began to work on his reading.

Digital Difference

If your child is an uncertain reader, you might wonder whether extensive experience with digital media is somehow impoverishing her reading. There’s little indication that reading on a screen is substantially different from reading on paper.

Research does show that the way a book is put on the screen can affect comprehension, but the effects are relatively modest. For example, comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling. And clickable links (hyperlinks) incur a cost to comprehension even if you don’t click them. Because you can see that they are clickable, you still need to make a decision about whether to click. That draws on your attention and so carries a cost to comprehension. But most of these effects are small, so if you’re wondering whether your child would enjoy reading more on an e-reader (or whether reading on such a device is frustrating him), I’d say “probably not.”

There is one qualification to that conclusion. If your child’s school is considering moving to electronic textbooks, be at least a little wary. Publishers are working to improve electronic textbooks, but with the current offerings, the research is pretty consistently negative. Comprehension is about the same as when reading on paper, but reading is less efficient. It takes longer to read electronic textbooks, and it feels more effortful. Quite consistently, a majority of students who have used electronic textbooks say they would rather use paper. The problem is probably not due to greater difficulty decoding an electronic book; the problem is that reading for pleasure is different from reading for school. The information is structured differently, it’s more complex, and you’re reading it to learn and remember it, not just to enjoy it.

This greater complexity and the demand that students do more with textbooks characterize the reading challenges that begin in upper elementary school. In the next chapter, we turn out attention to these complications.