As I dive more and more into the Science of Reading, I am actually surprised that fluency remains one of the pillars for reading. Before you jump to conclusions that I’ve lost my mind or any understanding of what reading has to accomplish to be successful, let me explain.

First, I would like to say how grateful I am for the chance to write these posts. What started as a way to help readers, specifically my sister, understand more about reading as they work to help children learn to read, has become a way for me to understand reading better and organize my thoughts more about it. Writing these has helped bring more clarity to each piece of reading and the way they fit together and I am SO grateful. Having that clarity gives me more focus and the combination of the two will help me to do a better job of helping my daughters and my students traverse the sometimes rocky terrain of reading.

Back to fluency and explaining my thoughts on why it seems odd as a pillar of reading. First, why I think it remains a pillar. To be sure you must be a fluent reader to comprehend well. Fluency is also what takes reading from a lesson or a chore to a pleasure and an adventure. And these facts are, I’m sure, the reason it IS one of the five pillars of reading. The reason I say I am surprised that it is left as a pillar is that the more I read and learn about the Science of Reading, the more I realize that fluency is a byproduct of accuracy and automaticity of the foundational skills of reading.

To kind of paint a picture of this, I find it helpful to think of Scarborough’s Reading Rope which is based on the Simple View of Reading. The Simple View of Reading says that reading is made up of two parts: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding is a blend of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness. As a learner becomes accurate and automatic in both of these skills, they become a quick and efficient Orthographic Mapper. Once they become an efficient orthographic mapper, they build a larger and larger sight vocabulary and reading becomes more and more effortless. This then adds the third element of decoding which is sight recognition. This would reach by many definitions or assessments fluent reading. Strength in these three areas alone would give students a high score on tests like DIBELS ORF, it would aid them in the timely completion of STAR and MAP tests. But, without the other half of the simple view of reading, all of these abilities come to naught. That is because if all the learner has is decoding fluency then they cannot understand or remember or apply anything they read. Reading has become almost rote memorization. To me this drains reading of all of it’s color, drama and interest. It truly just becomes the job that so many struggling readers see it as. Interestingly enough, most struggling readers see it as a dreary chore, not because of a strength in decoding alone, but rather a deficit in decoding even if they have a strength in Comprehension. This leads us to the other half of the Simple View of Reading.

The second part of the Simple View of Reading is Language Comprehension. Now, like was discussed in my post on comprehension, comprehension is truly the understanding of BOTH what one reads AND what one hears. That is why it is called language comprehension in this view and not reading comprehension. According to Scarborough’s Rope, Language Comprehension is made up of background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. As you can see very little of this comprehension is actually based on reading. Rather it is based on talking. That is why when a teacher is trying to help students grow in comprehension their lessons must include lots of conversations. It is also why we need to facilitate conversations with our students, with our children at home, with our nieces and nephews and grandchildren. The more they talk and the more words they are exposed to in conversation, the greater their reading comprehension will become. This is because they then already have a foundation of strong knowledge of word meanings. Then as that Comprehension or knowledge of meanings is mixed with their decoding skills of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness and Orthographic Mapping then a reader is truly FLUENT. They are able to read accurately, with a natural rate of speed AND with the appropriate expression based on their understanding (comprehension) of the text.

Here’s a recap. Fluency remains a pillar of reading because without it reading doesn’t work. However, it is a pillar that, even more than the others, CANNOT stand alone because it is gained only through the development and success of the other pillars. Therefore, fluency rarely if ever needs to be targeted for remediation or intervention. It will naturally occur as you strengthen the other skills necessary for reading. It stands as a good example and important reminder that NONE of these pillars are meant to be alone. There are five pillars because the institution of reading cannot be held up by any one of them. If a learner is only strong in one, then that part of their reading will stand tall, but it will always be skewed as the other parts fall and slide and slant every which way. Fluency sets the example and the is the final marker of how reading is the coming together of five key parts to create one whole and balanced reader!

Happy reading! Let me know of any examples you have of seeing fluency grow, not from explicit fluency instruction, but from a learner growing either in a deficit pillar skill or in all of them simultaneously. I look forward to hearing your success stories, both to learn from you and to celebrate your victories!

Vocabulary is what most of us would think it is. It is the knowledge of the meaning of words. The difference from what I thought of as vocabulary and what I have come to think of it is how much oral language contributes to it. When I think of vocabulary I think of the vocab tests I took in school and that I have given to my students. However, I have come to understand that those types of vocabulary lessons and tests will have a limited impact on students’ vocabulary skills. However, a students’ oral vocabulary can have a big impact on their learning and vocabulary skills.

Just like the phonemic awareness skills that I have talked about in another post, vocabulary can be learned orally. As children learn to speak and they have conversations with their families and the people around them, they are developing their strongest vocabulary skills. If there is not enough conversation or the people they talk to have limited vocabularies, then their vocabularies will be limited too. This is why it is imperative that we force children to put their devices down and have conversations. They need to talk to each other and to their families and to their teachers. They need to research things they love and talk about them. They need to do book talks and describe the meaning of unknown words that they learn in their reading. This is because their oral vocabulary is the biggest indicator of their vocabulary skills. If a student has accurate and automatic Phonemic Awareness, accurate and automatic Phonological (phonics) Awareness and a limited oral vocabulary they will still struggle to map words efficiently. Because words are mapped by meaning, students who can decode words, but don’t know what they mean will struggle to map them quickly. They can still map them based on their knowledge of the meaning of the letter sounds and the reasons for the letters making those sounds. This knowledge and meaning will not be as useful as the meaning of the words themselves, though. However, if a student has that accurate and automatic foundation in phonemic and phonological awareness AND a strong oral vocabulary then they will grow their sight vocabulary much faster. This means that they will increase their fluency in reading much faster and efficiently.

This does NOT mean that there is no place for vocabulary tests, roots lessons and learning new words during Read Alouds, Book Studies, Science and Social Studies lessons. It does mean that we cannot rely on them for the building of students’ vocabularies. We need to build students’ vocabularies through class discussions, debate and life experiences and activities. We need to share with our students the value of face-to-face conversations. We need to draw them in by using big words and calling things like sounds by their actual names like phonemes. We need to call digraphs digraphs instead of just letter teams or pairs. Every opportunity you have to expose children to new words and meanings we must take.

The main takeaways are that vocabulary comes mainly through oral language and that we should do our best to provide our children and students with a rich oral vocabulary environment. When children or students have a limited oral vocabulary we can help them by providing these rich oral environments. We can still use vocabulary tests and roots lessons to build on what they know, but we need to remember that there is no substitute for having conversations! That is why we feel like we know that students or children have learned or mastered words when they start to use them when they talk. Vocabulary should be a never ending adventure in learning, there is always more to learn! Let me know some of the strategies that you have used successfully to help children grow their vocabularies!

Also, if you enjoyed this post you may enjoy these posts on the other pillars of reading:

Phonemic Awareness, What Is it and Why Does It Matter?

Orthographic Mapping

The Difference Between Phonemic and Phonological Awareness