Fluency is generally thought to be made up of two distinct components: accuracy and automaticity in word decoding, and prosody or meaningful expression when reading. Most professional articles and curriculum materials that focus on reading fluency deal primarily with the word-decoding component of fluency. In this and my next blog I would like to focus on the more neglected, but also critical, component of fluency: prosody.
If we think of someone who is fluent in their speaking or reading, we usually consider the way they express themselves. They speak or read with confidence, appropriate volume and rate, good phrasing and pausing at appropriate places, and, of course, good expression. Indeed, I think of prosody as the fluency connection or bridge to comprehension. To read with appropriate expression one has to monitor the meaning of the text, and in reading or speaking with expression the reader or speaker is enhancing the meaning of the text with his or her voice. Makes sense to you? Does for me. And the scientific research is clear on this point: readers who read with good expression and phrasing tend to be our best comprehenders. Every drop in expression and phrasing correlates with lower levels of reading comprehension.
Yet, despite what seems like a logical and important role for the prosodic component of fluency, it is often neglected when it comes to reading research, curriculum development, and instruction. Why is it the oft-neglected stepchild of fluency? I think there are several reasons. First, prosody or expression seems to deal with oral reading, and of course the goal of most reading programs is to improve silent reading. Why then bother with prosody? Again, research shows that the way we read orally is reflective of the way we read silently. Second, prosody is not as easy to measure as word recognition accuracy and automaticity, which is usually measured by the number of words a reader can read correctly in a minute (think DIBELS or Acadience). Measuring prosody requires a teacher to listen to a student read and make a subjective judgement about their level of expression. Can we trust teachers’ judgement? Research by myself and others has found that teachers are remarkably good and consistent in assessing the prosodic portion of reading. Indeed, most teachers spend a good portion of each day listening to students read.
The point I am trying to make here is that prosody is a key and essential part of the reading success equation, yet it is too often ignored or underrepresented in our classrooms. It is time to make prosody an equal partner in our fluency instruction. How do we do that? We do that by reading to our students with good prosody, having students read and simultaneously listen to texts read with good prosody, finding and using texts that foster prosodic reading, talking about prosodic reading with students, and much more that I will talk about in future blogs. For now, let’s commit ourselves to making prosody a non-negotiable part of our reading curricula.
