Reading Fluency

Reading must be fluent. Readers must have the ability to identify words automatically. If they must expend all their concentration on figuring out words, they are unable to focus on meaning. However, readers who can identify words automatically are able to focus their attention on meaning. Research shows that in the early grades children who make the swiftest progress in achieving fast and accurate word identification skills receive the best scores on reading comprehension tests, says Janet Lerner in her book Learning Disabilities: Theories, Diagnosis, and Teaching Strategies.

Children need to develop a fluency in word recognition so that they can concentrate on the meaning of the text. However, in order to develop their word recognition and thereby improve their reading fluency, one must first recognise that learning is a stratified process. One step needs to be mastered well enough before subsequent steps can be learnt. This means that there is a sequence involved in learning. It is like climbing a ladder; if you miss one of the rungs of the ladder, you will fall off. If you miss out on one of the important steps in the learning process, you will not be able to master subsequent steps.

A simple and practical example of this is the fact that one has to learn to count before it becomes possible to learn to add and subtract. If one tried to teach a child to add and subtract before he had been taught to count, one would quickly discover that no amount of effort would ever succeed in teaching the child these skills. In the same way there are also skills that form the foundation of word recognition. These foundational skills must be developed first, before the child will be able to identify words automatically, so that he can focus his concentration on the meaning of the text.

Basic skills like visual discrimination of foreground-background, form, size, position in space, and visual memory are all functions that form the foundation of word recognition. Until a child has mastered these basic skills first, reading will remain a closed — or, at most, a half-open — book to him.