In Quest for Speed, Books Are Lost on Children

Your fourth-grader is galloping through Lois Lowry's utopian novel "The Giver," and you marvel at her reading speed.

Stop marveling. Most likely she has little idea what the book actually means.

In many classrooms around the country, teachers are emphasizing, and periodically testing, students' reading fluency, the current buzzword in reading instruction. The problem is that speed isn't the only element to fluency, educators said. Key elements are also accuracy and expressiveness.

"The food was delectable" is different from "the food was detestable," and Shakespeare should not sound like a chemistry textbook.

It is a complicated process teaching students to recognize enough words and read at a consistent rate so they can spend their time concentrating on meaning rather than decoding, educators said. And when tackling a book such as "The Giver," one that deals with a boy's discovery that his utopian world comes at the expense of the stifling of intellectual and emotional freedom, meaning is critical.

"Fluent readers are readers who know how to dig into a book and pull out just what they are looking for -- whether it is information, a part with strong language, a part with good character development, or just a chance to read for fun," said Susan Marantz, a longtime teacher now at a suburban school in Columbus, Ohio.

Yet a combination of politics, insufficient teacher development and an inherent difficulty in capturing all aspects of fluency have led to questionable instruction practices, according to Richard Allington, a reading researcher and University of Tennessee professor who first wrote about the importance of fluency in the early 1980s.

Many students are asked by teachers to reread the same passages over and over -- often with constant interruptions from the teacher. And some struggling readers are given books -- including textbooks -- that are above their reading level and soon become a source of frustration.

"You can make any adult a disfluent reader by giving them books that are too hard and jump in and interrupt them a lot," Allington said. "What do you think it does to kids?"

As a result, some kids are motivated to read only to beat a test clock, he and other researchers said.

"Are kids responding well to fluency exercises?" asked Kylene Beers, a senior reading researcher at Yale University's School Development Program and chairwoman of the National Adolescent Literacy Coalition.

"The more important question to ask is: Are teachers focusing on all three parts of fluency?" Beers, vice president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, wrote in an e-mail. "When fluency is only about building automaticity (and therefore speed), then some [teachers] do mistakenly believe that the point of reading is fast decoding. That's no more the best measure of a skilled reader than fast driving is the best measure of skilled driver."