David Didau

researchED Engl ish & MFL

Oxford, 1 st Apri l 2017

The

importance of

reading

fluency

On today’s menu

• Impenetrable diagrams

• Maps, graphs and percentages!

• Some sciency bits

• An experience of being crap at reading

• 4th century theologians

• A mini (very unscientific) experiment

• Scooby Doo

Reading is complex

Skilled reading:

Fluent execution and

coordination of word

recognition and text

comprehension.

The Many Strands that are Woven into Skilled Reading

(Scarborough, 2001)

Language comprehension

Background knowledge(facts, concepts, etc.)

Vocabulary(Breadth, precision, links, etc.)

Language structures (syntax, semantics, etc.)

Verbal reasoning(inference, metaphor, etc.)

Literacy knowledge(print, concepts, genres etc.)

Word recognition

Phonological awareness(syllables, phonemes, etc.)

Decoding(alphabetic principle, spelling-

sound correspondences)

Sight recognition(of familiar words)

There is no correlation between ‘word

recognition’ skills and intelligence

If thee was, we would need to find evidence of the following

propositions:

1. that the pattern of information-processing skills that underlie the

reading deficits of low-IQ poor readers is different from the

information-processing skills that underlie the reading deficits of

high-IQ poor readers

2. that the neuroanatomical differences that underlie the cognitive

deficits of these two groups are different

3. that low- and high-IQ poor readers require different treatments to

remediate their reading problems

4. that there is differential etiology in the two groups based on

different heritability of the component deficits.

Stanovich (2005): “there is a wealth of evidence regarding [these propositions]

that is largely negative”.

So, what does cause reading

difficulty?

• Glue ear?– “It’s estimated that one in five children around the age

of two will be affected by glue ear at any given time,

and about 8 in every 10 children will have had glue

ear at least once by the time they’re 10 years old.”

www.nhs.uk

• Visual problems?– Maybe 1 in 5 children with undiagnosed visual issues

Optometry Today

• English orthography?

Errors in word reading at

the end of first grade

Seymour, Aro & Erskine (2003)

What’s going wrong?

All languages are not equal

7 years 8 years 9 years

20

40

60

80

English

French

Spanish

Goswami et al 1998

• At the age of 9 a French child does not read

as well as a 7 year old Spanish child.

• It takes 2 additional years of schooling for an

English child to reach the level of a French

child.

Evolution of error rates in pseudo word reading

0

Alphabetic CodesEnglish(deep orthography)44 smallest speech sounds (phonemes)

47+ units of sound /k+s/ /kw/ /y+oo/ /ul/

170+ spelling alternatives (graphemes)

(double that for rare & unique spellings)

Spanish (shallow orthography)

24 phonemes

40 graphemes

Fewer spelling alternatives than

sounds in English.

Memory affects comprehension

Working

memory

Long-term

memory

Attention

Learning

Remembering

Environment

Schemas

Long-term memory

• Declarative memory – what you think about (propositional knowledge)

• Non-declarative memory – what you think with (procedural knowledge)

• Schemas take up (roughly) the same space in working memory as isolated facts

• Through practice we can automatise procedural knowledge so that it becomes background knowledge.

The importance of fluency

They gradually ascended for half a mile

then found themselves at the top of a

considerable eminence where the

wood ceased theand eye was instantly

caught by Pemberley House situated on

the opposite side of the valley , into

which the road with some abruptness

wound.

Is comprehension possible?

1. What did they climb?

2. Where did the characters find themselves?

3. At what point did they first see Pemberley House?

4. Where was the house in relation to the characters?

5. How did the author describe the road?

Comprehension depends on reading

speed

They gradually ascended for

half a mile then found

themselves at the top of a

considerable eminence

where the wood ceased and

the eye was instantly caught

by Pemberley House situated

on the opposite side of the

valley, into which the road

with some abruptness

wound.

1. What did they climb?

2. Where did the characters find themselves?

3. At what point did they first see Pemberley House?

4. Where was the house in relation to the characters?

5. How did the author describe the road?

The cognitive processes

Visual auditory

• Attention

• Blocking distractions

• Visual systems

• Application of rules associating letters to sounds

• Saccades

Language

comprehension

• Meaning of words

• Semantic &

grammatical systems

• Inference & hypothesis

• Anticipation

What’s going on in memory?

Background knowledge is what you think with

not about.

Long-term

• Accuracy

• Fluency

• Prior knowledge

• Vocabulary

• Stories

Fast, automatic,

invisible

Working

• Inferences

• Clarifications

• Hypotheses

• Predictions

• Stories

Requires attention

& effort

Into the classroom…

• Many students ‘hate’ reading but everyone loves stories

• Independent reading is only likely to be beneficial if students can decode fluently

• How can you practice fluency?

• Is listening ‘cheating’?– Reading comprehension is highly correlated with listening

comprehension (Bell & Perfetti, 1994; Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990)

– For difficult-to-understand texts, prosody can be a real aid to understanding. (Kosslyn & Matt, 1977)

• Don’t make students ‘read along’

Episodic

buffer

Visuo-spatial

sketchpad

Phonological

loop

Episodic LTMVisual

semanticsLanguage

Working memory model

Fluid components

Crystallised components

Central executive

Baddeley, Working Memory: Theories,

Models, and Controversies (2011)

The phonological loop system

Phonological

store

Auditory

control

processes

Auditory word

presentation

(listening)

Visual word

presentation

(reading)

Words are ‘stored’ for about 2 seconds

before needing to be rehearsed.

The silent voice

• ‘Silent’ reading is pretty recent– “…his eyes scanned the page and his heart

sought out the meaning, but his voice was

silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could

approach him freely and guests were not

commonly announced, so that often, when we

came to visit him, we found him reading like

this in silence, for he never read aloud. Augustine, Confessions Book Six, Chapter Three

• Silence may be an illusion:

– We all subvocalise

– Prosody adds meaningSt Ambrose – 340 - 397 CE

Rubenstein, Lewis & Rubenstein, 1971; Colheart et al., 1977; Seidenberg et al., 1996; Ferrand,

2001 (Chapter 4)

Timeline of expert reading

Wolf, Proust and the Squid, p. 144

Word

appears

100 200 300 600

Saccade

begin

s

Semantic &

comprehension

processes

Visual word

form areaVisual areas

Executive &

attention processesVisual feature

analysis

Semantic &

phonological

processes

Are you reading ‘aloud’?

Lolita, light of my life,

fire of my loins. My sin,

my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the

tip of the tongue taking

a trip of three steps

down the palate to tap,

at three, on the teeth.

Lo. Lee. Ta.Nabokov, Lolita

An experiment…

“Hello, my name is ______ and you are

reading this in my voice.”

A B C

The limits of sound

• “Covert access to the pronunciation of written words

is an automatic step in reading, but this conversion

may not be indispensible.”

Dehaene, Reading in the Brain (p.29)

• How do we make sense of homophones?(muscles,

mussels)

• Sometimes we can’t pronounce a word:

– Worcestershire

• Sometimes we don’t want to:

– Otorhinolaryngologist

Key messages

1. Reading fluency is not linked to intelligence

2. English is harder to attain fluency in than most other languages

3. Fluency affects comprehension

4. The procedural knowledge of decoding can be automatised as non-declarative memory

5. Listening helps weaker readers comprehend text as long as they don’t have to read along.

@ D a v i d D i d a u

l e a r n i n g s p y . c o . u k

d d i d a u @ g m a i l . c o m

There’s nothing good or bad but

thinking makes it so