Doug Lemov on Fluency's Impact on Comprehension | Literacy and the Science of Learning

When we read fluently, we recognize words without effort. We also maintain an engaged pace (automaticity) and perceive expression (prosody), all of which support attention and leave working memory free to make meaning from a text. This is a complex achievement, and many students have fractured attention spans. What can educators do to account for interruptions and focus on building fluency, which is key to developing comprehension?

Host Doug Lemov looks at the science of how we read and the foundational aspects of literacy that teachers can purposefully support in the classroom. Today’s students are surrounded by digital distractions and struggle to focus with stamina, and many schools have responded by teaching shorter texts. But the change in student attention shows that it is malleable.

“What if, rather than reducing the attentional demands of what we read, we tried to build up students’ capacity to focus by carefully attending to the details of how they read?”

Doug details how educators can curate an environment where students regularly read attentively, thoughtfully, and deeply for sustained periods of time. They can reintroduce reading time in the classroom, have students read hard-copy books together, and build in social exchanges so students are motivated to interact with one another in thoughtful and sustained ways.

Researcher and literacy expert David Paige joins the conversation to explain the importance of sustained attention and fluency as it relates to working memory. In particular, oral reading can be a critical teaching tool, and read-alouds are powerful for students of all ages. When students read with prosody, they don’t just understand the meaning of the words in a passage; words begin to sound like spoken language, and students gain a more engaged internal reading “voice.”

“We can change students’ reading habits from the outside in.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Transcript

Doug Lemov

One of the most important and least understood things about reading is how new it is, evolutionarily speaking. While humans have probably been speaking for around half a million years, we’ve been reading for perhaps 5,000. And during those 5,000 years, it’s only been a small percentage of us that have even been able to. 

That might seem like a footnote for an anthropologist. But it’s actually really important because it tells us that we haven’t had time for our brains to evolve for reading. And the implications of THAT are much farther reaching than most people realize.

Welcome to the Knowledge Matters Podcast, season three: Literacy and the Science of Learning. This is episode three. I’m Doug Lemov, co-author of the forthcoming book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. 

Let’s get back to our brains. As you’ll remember from the first episode, humans have evolved to learn some biologically primary skills on their own. Parts of the brain have adapted to facilitate this process. Spoken language is one example. 

Human babies, left unaided, will start to babble. They’ll copy the people around them. They’ll learn to speak and understand language naturally—and without intervention. Barring sensory or cognitive dysfunction almost every human will do this.  

But a baby left untutored will not learn to read. There is no part of the brain designed specifically to facilitate that process. It’s simply too new. Instead we rely on something called neuroplasticity: our brain's ability to repurpose areas of the cortex designed for one thing to do another. Every time we read, we are rewiring parts of our brain that have evolved for some other task and putting them into service of reading. 

We are always rewiring when we read. And the details of how we read, including the environment in which it’s done, shape that process.

In an era of technological distraction, this is especially relevant. When we read on screens, we toggle to new sources of information constantly. The more we read in a state of distracted half-attention, the more we wire for it. We come to want—and maybe need—new stimulus. 

Consider a teenager. He has been required by his parents, or teacher, to read for 45 minutes several times a week. He’s doing that now, lying on his back on the living room couch. A book is in his hands, his cell phone on his chest. 

Every few seconds he is interrupted by a text message.

BZZZ. Dude. S’up. Coming over?  

BZZZ. Hey man, the math homework?

BZZZ Hey, you going to ask that girl Kaley out?

His reflections on the book and his connection to the characters will be shaped by that choppy and distracted interaction. A good summary is the phrase: We wire how we fire. 

How we read affects how we can and will read going forward. This observation is of profound importance—doubly so in an age of advanced technology. Genie Baca, principal at Eastridge Elementary in Amarillo, Texas, sees the cost of fractured student attention. 

Genie Baca 

I know the biggest thing, principals, that we're struggling with right now is kids who are screen addicted. They're so addicted to their cell phones, their screens. It's very hard to get them to pay attention very long because their brain has been rewired, so to speak. So I think that's one of the main things principals are dealing with is competing against technology. 

Doug Lemov

If nothing else, the smartphone and social media have shown us that attention—the ability to sustain focus on a challenging task—is malleable. And this realization has caused Baca to advocate for what you might call a low tech high text approach to reading. 

Genie Baca   

When we have to do assessments, we use computers. But daily in all classrooms, we try to teach from the book, from the writing activity—like they're physically writing, not on a keyboard. But just knowing that when you learn how to get kids to love reading and engage in reading—for a principal, half of our job is discipline, and that will take care of itself.

Doug Lemov

In a recent survey with over 300 educators, EdWeek found that 83% said their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019. I talked with the editor of EdWeek, Stephen Sawchuk, about the general fracturing of student attention because of tech. This is one of the most significant and least acknowledged factors in literacy instruction.  

Stephen Sawchuk

I do think that there was—has been a movement in educational publishing, over at least a decade, of putting things on Chromebooks, putting things on smartphones, you know, interactive, video laden, you know what I mean? Always in the ed-tech sector, there's been this idea that these things are more engaging, right? This term is never really well defined, right? But—and kids are going to like it more. You even see it in textbook design with a million things happening on the page, right? You know, with like lots of little breakout boxes and stuff.

I try not to be too cynical about this, right? Like I don't want to assume that the intent was wholly bad there. But I do start to wonder whether all of that is just taking kids' attention off print, right? Like and off—off of what we want them to do. Which is, you know, read at length challenging things with complicated sentence structures, right? Because of course the way we read and the way texts are put together is very different from the way we speak. 

Doug Lemov

This raises a “what to do” question for teachers. How might instruction need to shift to accommodate students’ shortened attention spans? Should we stop reading long texts? Use other media? 

The National Council of Teachers of English recently advocated for this: Decenter the book. Replace reading and essay writing with videos, they argued. Honestly, that’s shameful.

But if attention is malleable for students, what if, rather than reducing the attentional demands of what we read, we tried to build up students’ capacity to focus by carefully attending to the details of how they read. We could curate an environment where they made a habit of reading attentively, thoughtfully and deeply for sustained periods of time. 

This may be harder to do than showing you a youtube video, but the value for their learning is greater. Recognizing that learning always starts with attention and then working to rebuild students' attentional skills means making changes to materials and to instruction.

That’s what Genie Baca has tried to do at Eastridge Elementary. As you’ll hear in the next episode, the results have been striking. But Genie Baca and her staff aren’t the only ones doing this. Here’s Stephen Sawchuk.

Stephen Sawchuk

We're starting to see a little bit, I think, of a backlash to that with people questioning, do we really need Chromebooks in the classroom? And do we really need these—this electronic flair, right? For like, lack of better way to describe it.

Doug Lemov

So what can rebuild students’ attentional skills? Top of the list is bringing reading back into the classroom. This sounds obvious but in most classrooms, students actually read very little. A few minutes a day perhaps.

The assumption is that they can and will read at home. But we should know better than to assume they’ll read at home. And, in any event, failing to read in class misses out on the opportunity to create an optimal reading environment to help students wire for attentive reading, and thinking.

Next is to have students reading hard copy books, not off of screens. I’ll talk much more about whole books in episode four, but one reason for a hard copy is so students can practice annotation—marking up the text with margin notes and underlines in pencil. Specific annotation tasks can help shape students’ attention as they read and cause them to prioritize thinking about what’s important rather than just reading passively.

Third, they should be reading together. If everyone is reading together we can keep them reading together for five or eight or ten minutes at a clip. We should work towards students reading in sustained unbroken bursts of perhaps ten minutes at a time. Then maybe some shared discussion or individual reflection, and back into the book.

Lastly, sociability is key. Students should see and hear other students reading and responding to books in sustained and thoughtful ways. That makes them more likely to do it themselves. These steps will wire their brains to get better at deep, attentive thoughtful reading as a habit.

You’ll hear from both Stephen and Genie in the next episode. Now I want to turn the focus to another overlooked, but crucial, factor when it comes to reading: Fluency.  What happens when a student doesn’t process what they are reading as fast as they see the words?

Fluent readers read with accuracy, automaticity (or pace), and prosody (expression). Fluency for all readers— both native english speakers and multi-language learners—is one of the most overlooked factors to reading comprehension. But the science of reading tells us it’s critical. 

Let me explain why. When you are presented with text in your native language and you are a fluent reader you can’t not read it. If you look at a No Parking sign, you will read those two words faster than you can decide not to read them. That’s Fluency. You didn’t have to think about the words on the No Parking sign. You read words pretty much as fast as you see them. 

And because you can read the No Parking sign fluently, your brain—and more specifically your working memory—is free to think about other things: Oh, there’s an open spot on the other side of the street. Or: But wait, it’s Sunday.

Back to the classroom. If a student is reading fluently, their brain is free to think about other things in the text: Why that word? What’s unspoken here? What is this character feeling? 

As my co-host Dylan Wiliam discussed in the last episode, working memory can only hold a few things at a time. It’s like a scratch pad. This means that if you have to stop and think about what the words say, even briefly, it's much much harder to think about what they mean. The science on this is overwhelming. 

David Paige, Professor of Literacy Education at Northern Illinois University, explains. 

David Paige

You know, fluency is loading words into working memory. You know, loading words about the sentence into working memory. And if that's going nice and smoothly, then, you know, the reader is able to process those words as they're reading the sentences. And they're able to think about some bigger meaning. 

If it's going quite slowly or if it's really choppy, then that process gets disrupted. And so what can happen in more extreme cases is, you know, a reader may be stopped on a word and, you know, may stop on the word for several seconds or longer. And then what's been loaded in working memory is starting to decay—is the word psychologists would use. In other words they start to lose what they just read or what they read, more importantly, a couple sentences ago.

You know, I come to a word, I'm not sure how to read it. I have to stop, figure out how to say it or guess at the word or just skip it. I have an interruption right there. And now I'm back to hopefully reading some more words that I do know how to read and then thinking about what they mean. So, you know, the stopping and starting is just a continual interruption. And it degrades comprehension.

Doug Lemov

David Paige says that if students have to stop and think about the words themselves comprehension is disrupted. It’s not just that it happens slower. Working memory is limited and is used for perception, so dysfluent students will understand and perceive less. They won’t notice things in the text and will struggle to think about what they're reading. 

If you have a perceptive student whose brilliance seems to evaporate when they start reading harder text, there’s a decent chance the issue is fluency. And the scary thing is how common dysfluency is. Even into middle and high school. In some classrooms it could be that half the class can’t read grade level text fluently. 

David Paige

It's a big problem. And so, teachers kind of, they understand that, yeah, my kids have big reading problems. They don't really understand what exactly what the nature of the reading problem is, except that they don't comprehend well. You almost always will get that. And then you'll hear some of them talk about, Yeah, they're not fluent readers. But that's as far as you can go. So it just kind of gets ignored. 

Doug Lemov

This is important. Until students can read fluently, meaning making—not to mention the enjoyment one derives from reading—is very very hard to come by. David Paige says that if kids leaving early elementary school are dysfluent, they just get more and more behind as they get older. 

But there’s a second problem with fluency. Often teachers and parents don’t know how fluent students are. Beyond the elementary years fluency rarely gets assessed. So it’s a big issue but we don’t even know its true extent. 

David Paige

Going into kind of the upper elementary grades, uh that whole process just continues. It kind of gets a little bit worse because the words are becoming more complex. You're encountering words that were the graphene, phoneme, connections are—you're going to have a lot of alternate pronunciations used.

So for example, the idea that in the word “each.” EA makes a long E sound. It's not E—A—CH, you know. [laughs] So you get into all kinds of words like that. And so they're already struggling with a lot of words that maybe have direct letter to sound connections and they don't really have that down as well. So now the disfluency continues.

And so this is going to mean that any type of reading that they're doing, whether it's in class reading, anything that they have to read at home if they're given an assignment to read, it's just going to take a long time. And they may not engage in it at all. 

Then by the time they get into middle school, which is where I taught, you know, you really have a child who just really, really struggles with reading. They don't like reading. And so, a lot of them, in extreme cases, will do whatever they need to do to not have to read. And so that, lots of times, leads to behavior problems. But generally, it just leads to impoverished learning. 

Doug Lemov

Paige published a study in 2014 about the tandem theory of reading. It suggests that if you are a fluent reader, you can adjust your rate of reading and how you express the words to respond to your own understanding. Fluent readers who start to struggle adapt. He says this is essential to why it’s important to teach, or at least assess, fluency in middle and high school. 

David Paige 

The reason we're doing this, this becomes a really helpful tool for you to be able to understand what you're reading. Whether you're reading something about a topic that you're really interested in, that you're not reading for in class. Whether you're reading something that you have to read. You can adjust, you have control over your reading, over your reading fluency, which is basically kind of the conveyor that's loading propositions in the text or ideas in the text into your brain, that are then circulating what you already know about that text to create either new knowledge—you know, basically that's what you're trying to do. 

So if we could get teachers to understand this is what—so fluency is not an afterthought. You know. This is the end result that is really critical to comprehension

Doug Lemov

For this reason oral reading is very important. Teachers should read aloud to students so they can “hear” what a book sounds like. And students should practice reading for fluency. This is something that silent reading cannot accomplish. 

Ironically, teachers often think they are not teaching when they are reading with students but it’s one of the most valuable things they can do. Even in high school.  

David Paige 

Well, I think when you get the older grades, for disfluency, I think teachers have to be trained on things that they can do quickly and easily in the classroom because remember their job, they're tasked with teaching content. And there's a huge push to cover the content, cover off all the content. Whether they actually learn it or not. You covered it, right? [laughs]

So I think what we need to work with teachers on is, how can you help students with that? For example, you can uh, you could actually take a text, a teacher could, and do a read aloud while you have kids follow along with their text. You can point out specific words. Call their attention to specific words, how to pronounce those words, and very quickly what those words mean in the context of the text. You know, half of understanding a teacher's content is understanding the vocabulary, whether it's math, social studies, whatever it is.

And the other issue is being sure they know how to read that word. You spend all this time as a content teacher, you know, teaching students. And they hear you use a word, you know, a content specific word, but it does not mean they know how to read that word when they encounter it in text. 

So they get on the state exam, they encounter that word, they don't know what it means. They don't know how to read it. And so are they going to get that question right? Well, there's a good chance that they won't. You know, it certainly decreases the chances. And if you say, “Well, you know, that word was, you know, amphibian.” "Oh, that's that word. Oh, frogs—oh, I know what that is."

Doug Lemov

Interestingly, to hear the vocabulary words that students don’t know and to read aloud to students to support understanding, it really helps—just maybe it’s necessary—to be reading a shared text together. 

In Teach Like a Champion—and in the forthcoming Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading—I’ve written about an oral reading technique called FASE, F-A-S-E, reading. It stands for fluent, attentive, social, and expressive. FASE reading causes all students to read aloud and to follow along while others are doing it, so that even reluctant readers get a chance. 

One of the key principles is that students read in short bursts. This helps maximize their attention on the text so they read it successfully and feel successful. Then, they’ll come back and read again. Re-reading is critical in supporting struggling readers. To develop fluency, students should often read a passage or set of sentences multiple times, seeking to be more automatic and more expressive each time.

Most of all, shared oral reading, FASE, builds prosody, the part of fluent reading where students don’t just get the words right, they invest them with meaning. They sound like spoken language. When students learn to read this way orally, research suggests their internal, silent reading voice often becomes more prosodic and engaging. In other words, we can often change students' reading habits from the outside in.

In the next episode, you’ll hear Lori Hughes, one of Genie Baca’s teachers at Eastridge Elementary, using this technique and bringing the text to life to build student fluency. And as you’ll hear, it’s a bit like reading contagion. Students love it. They hear each other reading fluently. And they want to be a part of it.

The Knowledge Matters Podcast is co-hosted by me, Doug Lemov, along with Natalie Wexler and Dylan Wiliam. To learn more about my work and pre-order the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, visit: teachlikeachampion.org

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Learn more about this episode and their work at knowledgematterscampaign.org. There, you can find curriculum resources, blogs, and sign up for their periodic newsletter. 

To catch all of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, Season 3: Literacy and the Science of Learning, make sure you subscribe to the Knowledge Matters Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.