Download Developing fluency in reading

Developing fluency in reading
Paul Nation
LALS, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Conditions for fluency development
The fluency strand only exists if certain conditions are present.
1
The learners’ focus is on receiving or conveying meaning.
2
All of what the learners are listening to, reading, speaking or writing is largely
familiar to them. That is, there are no unfamiliar language, or largely familiar
content or discourse features.
3
There is some pressure or encouragement to perform at a faster than usual speed.
4
There is a large amount of input or output.
Typical activities include speed reading, skimming and scanning, repeated reading, 4/3/2,
repeated retelling, ten minute writing, and listening to easy stories. Fluency development
is one of the four strands of a well-balanced language course. The strands include
meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency
development. Each of these four strands should get roughly equal time in a course.
Reading fluency
When people read, three types of action are involved - fixations on particular words,
jumps (saccades) to the next item to focus on, and regressions (movements back to an
item already looked at). A skilled reader reading at around 250-300 words per minute
makes around 95 fixations per 100 words. Most words are fixated on, but function
words much less often than content words. The longer the word, the more likely it
is to receive a fixation. If the word is really long, it may receive 2 or even 3
fixations.
spends around 200 milliseconds on each fixation (about 5 per second). These vary
a lot depending on how difficult a word or sentence is to read.
makes saccadic jumps of around 1.2 words in English (About eight letters. In
Finnish, where words are longer, the average jump is 10 letters). This is around
the maximum number of letters that can be seen clearly in one fixation. During
the jump no items can be focused on. A jump takes about 20 milliseconds. The
basic unit in the jump is the word and languages with quite different writing
systems (for example English and Chinese) all tend to have an average of one
jump for every 1.2 words.
makes around 15 regressions in every 100 fixations. Regressions occur because
the reader made too big a jump (many regressions are only a few letters long), and
because there were problems in understanding the text.
There is thus a physiological limit on reading speed where reading involves fixating on
most of the words in the text. This is around 330 words per minute.
Effects of a speed reading course
In a study of a speed reading course (Chung and Nation, 2006) (1) almost all learners
increased their reading speed (an average increase of 73 words per minute or 52% using a
conservative measure), some very substantially, (2) most of the increase occurred in the
first ten texts but there were still gains to be made by reading at least twenty texts, and (3)
most learners made a gradual increase in speed rather than making sudden jumps or
staying on a plateau for a while before making an increase. Thirty-eight (95%) out of
forty students increased their speed; five out of the thirty-eight students more than
doubled their speed.
Table 1: A graph showing gradual increase
A speed reading course takes around 10 minutes per session. It should run for around 20
sessions which could be somewhere between seven and ten weeks. It requires no real
work from the teacher. It brings about substantial increases for most learners. This smalltime investment brings large benefits.
References
Chung, M. and Nation, I.S.P. (2006) The effect of a speed reading course. English
Teaching 61, 4: 181-204.
Nation, I.S.P. (2008) Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. New York: Routledge.
Nation, P. & Malarcher, C. (2007). Reading for Speed and Fluency, Books 1, 2, 3 & 4
Seoul: Compass Publishing.