Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  “happens faster for kids who have a hard time learning to read”: Walberg and Tsai (1985).

  “putting them in the ‘slow’ reading group”: Wallbrown, Brown, and Engin (1978).

  “including good children’s literature in a reading program would be associated with more positive attitudes, as would reading aloud to students”: Bottomley, Truscott, Marinak, Henk, and Melnick (1999); Morrow (1983, 1992).

  “Studies going back to the 1960s have shown that student engagement is driven primarily by the teacher’s actions, not the program.”: Chall (1967).

  “one thousand decisions every school day”: Jackson (1968).

  “Reading is given a place of prominence”: Guthrie and Cox (2001).

  “it’s helpful when teachers model enthusiasm for reading”: Janiuk and Shanahan (1988).

  “What you don’t want to see is endless praise, especially praise that focuses on performance.”: Mueller and Dweck (1998).

  “that she sees her parents and siblings reading, that there are books in the home, and so forth”: Baker, Scher, and Mackler (1997); Braten, Lie, Andreassen, and Olaussen (1999).

  “starting when your child is in early elementary school is still a good idea”: Villiger, Niggli, Wandeler, and Kutzelmann (2012).

  “Kids change their minds about who they are”: Grotevant (1987).

  “this attitude on the part of parents is not just associated with higher motivation to read in their children”: Baker and Scher (2002).

  “it is associated with better reading achievement than when parents think of reading as an important school skill”: Baker (2003).

  PART III

  THIRD GRADE AND BEYOND

  Chapter 8

  Reading with Fluency

  Your child is now a third grader or older. Assuming all has gone more or less to plan, doesn’t he know how to decode by this age? He does, but there are actually two processes of decoding, not one. The first process, more easily observed, develops in kindergarten. The second process, clandestine, develops slowly and is still being fine-tuned as late as high school. It’s this second process that supports fluency, and it’s just as important as the first process, for it enables your child to read quickly and effortlessly. In this chapter, we look at ways to ensure it develops in full.

  The Second Type of Decoding: Reading via Spelling

  So far I have described decoding as the process by which the reader turns printed letters into sound. I said beginning readers don’t recognize words by their appearance—that is, by their spelling. But we can think of cases where it would seem that spelling must count for something. If reading depended only on sound, how could you differentiate homophones like “knight” and “night”? You could argue that you use sound to read the word, but then you use the meaning of the sentence to figure out whether “knight” or “night” is meant. Thus, when you read the line from Sandburg’s poem “Night from a railroad car window is a great, dark, soft thing,” you know the poet is talking about the evening because a mounted soldier in armor is unlikely to be seen from a railroad car. But if I use surrounding context to disambiguate meaning, then it shouldn’t be noticeable if I encounter the phrase, “My favorite Beatles album is A Hard Day’s Knight” or a reference to a strongman performing “feets of strength.” Spelling, it seems, does matter to reading.

  It turns out that experienced readers have two ways of accessing word meaning from print. The first is the way I’ve already described: you use a set of rules to translate the printed letters to sound, and then more or less say the word to yourself. The sound of the word is connected to its meaning. The second method uses the spelling: you directly match letters on the page to your knowledge of how words are spelled. That spelling knowledge is also connected to the meaning (figure 8.1).

  Figure 8.1. Two reading pathways. There are two ways to get from print on the page to meaning in your mind. A complete diagram would include other connections—expecting a particular meaning influences what you hear, for example—but we’ll keep things simple.

  Source: © Daniel Willingham.

  Fluency and Attention

  The spelling knowledge you use to read is a bit like your ability to recognize objects in that you don’t need to consciously consider what things look like to recognize them. You don’t say to yourself, “Hmm, let’s see . . . there’s a paw, and that looks sort of like a muzzle, and that thing is probably a tail . . . this is shaping up to be a dog.” You just see a dog. And like your ability to recognize objects, your ability to visually recognize words includes being able to recognize pieces; even though you seldom encounter a dog’s paw in isolation, you would know that it’s a paw. Likewise, spelling representations in the mind can identify clumps of letters that you frequently see, even though they are typically part of a word. That’s why “fage” looks more like a word than “fajy.” The letter “j” is seldom followed by the letter “y,” but “ge” is a frequently encountered clump of letters.

  Reading by spelling does allow you to differentiate homophones like “knight” and “night,” but there’s a much more important advantage: it’s faster and easier to use than the translation rules. Translation rules demand a lot of attention (symbolized by the radiating lines in figure 8.1). Just as the beginner driving a car must consciously think about how far to turn the steering wheel to change lanes, how closely he’s following the car ahead, and so on, the attention of the beginning reader is absorbed by sounding words out: “Let’s see, ‘o’ usually sounds like AW, but when there are two of them, ‘oo,’ they make a different sound . . . what was it again?” That makes it hard to focus on understanding the meaning of what she’s reading.

  With experience, all of that thinking the driver had to do seems to disappear. Driving becomes automatic, and you can stay in your lane and keep the car at the correct speed without really thinking about it. That leaves your attention free to do something else: daydream or talk with a passenger, for example. In the same way, practice in reading reduces the attentional demand imposed by translation rules—reduces, but never completely eliminates. You can feel the small attentional cost yourself when you encounter an unfamiliar word and sound it out; for a short one like “fey,” the cost may be barely noticeable, but make the word long so that it really taxes the translation process, and you notice that your reading slows down. Try “triskaidekaphobia.”

  In contrast, using word spellings to read requires very little attention, if any. You just see it in the same way you just see and recognize a dog. As your child gains reading experience, there is a larger and larger set of words that he can read using the spelling, and so his reading becomes faster, smoother, and more accurate. That’s called fluency.

  Fluency and Prosody

  It’s easy to see that fluency would aid comprehension. With sound translation demanding less attention, more attention can be paid to meaning. There’s a second, somewhat more subtle way that fluency helps comprehension. Fluency actually ends up helping comprehension through sound. Here’s how.

  I mentioned prosody in chapter 2 when discussing “motherese.” You’ll recall that it’s the sort of melody of speech. We don’t speak in a monotone; words vary in pitch, pacing, and emphasis. This melody carries meaning. If I say, “What a great party,” with enthusiasm or with sarcasm, the words are the same. Only the prosody differs. Prosody helps you differentiate sarcasm from enthusiasm; it also helps with the essential but less glamorous donkey work of comprehension, namely, assigning grammatical roles to words (figure 8.2).

  Figure 8.2. Prosody and meaning. This grammar joke has made the rounds on Facebook. In school we learn where to place commas based on grammar, but most of us don’t use them that way when we read. Instead, the comma carries auditory significance. It signals an accent just before the comma and a pause after—hence, LET’S EAT . . . GRANDMA. In the second case we hear LET’S EAT GRANDma.

  Source: © Daniel Willingham.

  Even when you read silently, you add prosodic infor
mation to help you comprehend. Poet Billy Collins put it more eloquently: “I think when you’re reading in silence you actually hear the poem in your head because the skull is like a little auditorium.” If you’re reading fluently, access to individual words requires almost no attention, and that means you have more attention to devote to working out the prosody. Indeed, some research indicates that it is the development of prosody, and not the reading rate itself, that leads to the boost in reading comprehension associated with fluency (figure 8.3).

  Figure 8.3. The silent reader. St. Ambrose, depicted in this statue on the Giureconsulti Palace in Milan, was a fourth-century archbishop of that city. St. Augustine famously noted that Ambrose read silently: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Some scholars have taken this passage as evidence that people at that time typically read aloud. That hypothesis matches the fact that punctuation was then used only sporadically; vocalizing would help the reader hear the prosody.

  Source: Photo by Giovanni Dall-Orto, Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Saint_Ambrose#mediaviewer/File:IMG_3106_-_Milano_-_Sant%27Ambrogio_sul_Palazzo_dei_Giureconsulti_-_Foto_di_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto_3-gen-2007.jpg

  Fluency allows for better comprehension of what you read. And fluency depends on being able to read via spelling. So how do you learn to do that?

  Learning to Read via Spelling

  I start by clarifying what might have sounded like a contradiction. In chapter 5, I wrote, “It doesn’t work very well to teach reading by encouraging children to memorize what words look like. You have to teach the sound-translation rules.” Now I’m concluding that “reading by spelling is essential to good reading.” But these ideas don’t really contradict one another. Memorizing what words look like is impractical for learning to read, but once children know how to read, they teach themselves how to read via spelling.

  Suppose I were trying to train a child to recognize words by their spellings. I might show her the word “dog” and tell her, “That word is dog.” Then I show her the word “log,” and tell her, “That word is log.” The child who can decode doesn’t need me to tell her the identity of each printed word. She tells herself. When she decodes a word using the sound mechanism, she’s identifying which word she’s seeing and she’s seeing the letter pattern at the same time. With enough repetitions, the spelling of the word and its identity come to be associated.

  This is called the self-teaching hypothesis. Most kids are taught how to sound words out, but they teach themselves (without knowing they are doing so) what words look like, based on practice distributed over several years. It’s hard to give a firm estimate of exactly how long it takes to become a fluent reader. For one thing, fluency is graded. It’s not that you’re fluent or you’re not; it’s that your reading slowly becomes more and more fluent, so defining a time you’ve reached the goal is a little arbitrary. That said, the first stage of fluency is noticeable; there is some point at which a child seems to have turned a corner—she is no longer painstakingly sounding out each word but is instead reading. That might come after, say, six to nine months of decoding practice. And that’s another thing that makes it hard to come up with an estimate of when it will happen. It’s not the passage of time that’s crucial; it’s what’s happening during that time. Fluency will come faster or slower depending on how much reading the child does. The more frequently she encounters a word, the richer her knowledge of what it looks like.

  What’s Happening at School

  The main mechanism to develop fluency is reading. As in younger grades, reading aloud with feedback is preferable to silent reading, but that may become less practicable in many classrooms as kids get older because their reading competence diverges more. Fortunately, reading aloud is somewhat less important (compared to when students were learning to decode) because competent decoders can provide mostly accurate feedback to themselves.

  It would be nice to get kids to fluency faster, especially given that national tests indicate only about half of kids have reached desired levels of fluency by fourth grade. Is there a way to hurry the process along?

  Three techniques can help. First, explicit spelling instruction seems to improve fluency. Although the spelling knowledge you use to read is not identical to the knowledge you use when you’re thinking about how to spell a word, there is some overlap. So that’s a reason to include spelling instruction in schools, even though we all use word processors with spell-checkers (figure 8.4).

  Figure 8.4. Spelling matters. Spelling instruction seems to promote fluency, but there are other reasons spelling is important. For example, tattoo machines don’t come with spell-check.

  Source: © doris oberfrank-list—Fotolia. Modified from the image.

  A second technique that can help students develop fluency is for the teacher to model reading with prosody. If reading with the right melody is the mechanism by which fluency helps comprehension, then students should know what they are aiming toward. Note too that this is still another benefit of parents’ reading aloud to their children, even as they get older. It might also help for kids to occasionally hear negative examples—the teacher reading as fast as possible, for example, or in a robotic voice.

  A third technique to develop fluency is repeated reading. The child reads the same text enough times so that he can do so fluently. As when an adult models prosody, the idea is to give him a better idea of what fluent, prosodic reading sounds like, so he knows what he’s trying to do.

  The research evidence for these techniques is not terribly strong, however; sometimes they seem to work, and sometimes they don’t. It may be that when the interventions were tested, they have not been of sufficient duration, or it may be that some kids had other reading issues that were preventing them from getting the full benefit of fluency. But researchers have had less success with in-school training regimens for fluency than when they’ve targeted other reading processes.

  What to Do at Home

  Even if the main prescription for fluency—“tons of reading”—seems obvious, how to get older kids to engage in tons of reading is not. Let’s look at what parents can do to get reluctant older kids to read.

  Is There a Problem?

  Before you consider your role in helping your child develop reading fluency, you need some sense of how it’s going. His school likely monitored reading closely in the early grades, but once he learned to decode fairly well, that monitoring probably tapered off. You too may have thought that the process of learning to read was pretty much done and that your child was all set. And now, when he’s older, if he seems to do his assigned reading and his teacher is satisfied, you wouldn’t have had much reason to question whether he’s a fluent reader.

  You can get a sense of your child’s reading fluency by asking him to read aloud. Fluent reading will be expressive, whereas dysfluent reading will sound robotic, expressionless. The fluent reader will pause at places that sound natural, conversational. Dysfluent reading has pauses, but the reading sounds halting—you can hear that the reader is stuck on a word and is figuring it out. A fluent reader seldom loses his place while reading, and, when reading silently, he doesn’t move his mouth much. A dysfluent reader does both.

  If his reading is dysfluent, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dyslexic. It probably means he needs more practice than other kids to develop fluency and hasn’t had it yet. And given that reading is effortful, he gets less pleasure from reading and therefore avoids it. That means practice is unlikely without a little push.

  What Does a Dysfluent Reader Need?

  Some parents I have known simply charged ahead and required that their child practice reading. If that’s you, the same approach I described in chapter 5 applies: brief daily sessions (five or ten minutes) with age-appropriate support and enthusiasm from you, along with a good dose of persistence to ensure that it happens. Some parents use a clever method to ensure practice; their child
is allowed to watch thirty minutes of television each day but beyond that it can only be watched with the volume muted and closed captioning on.

  If you take this direct route, it’s worth thinking about how you will talk to your child about the need for practice. Not many kids will respond well to a logical argument about the value of reading. Anything you might tell them, they already know. In fact, they know quite well that being a reader is associated with intelligence, and many will see their halting reading as evidence that they are just not that smart. (In fact, the opposite is probably true. Anyone who earns passing grades without being a strong reader probably has a good memory and reasons well.)

  The point of reading practice is not the correction of a defect in your child. Rather, you are hoping to enrich her life. I think about reading much the way I think about food. Why don’t I let my child eat mostly mac-and-cheese and carrot sticks? Because even though she believes she’d be perfectly happy on that limited diet, I think that eating affords some of the most transcendent pleasures available. Of course, I want that for my child. In the same way, I want her to have access, through reading, to the greatest minds of history. A child who has long felt indifferent to reading won’t see it that way, but if you explain your motivation, she will at least understand that you are not criticizing her for some lack. Your goal is not for her to be a good reader; it’s that she enjoy reading.