Spotlight on Dyslexia Event Speakers

In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf reminds us that “Fluency does not ensure better comprehension; rather, fluency gives enough extra time to the executive system to direct attention where it is most needed—to infer, to understand, to predict, or sometimes to repair discordant understanding and to interpret a meaning afresh.” Fluency, the rapid, prosodic flow with which a skilled reader reads, is the bridge between decoding and comprehension. As a reader’s fluency improves, it creates bandwidth and cognitive space for the skills we know are required for deep comprehension. In fact, reading fluency should be thought to be on a continuum that increases in complexity as the text becomes more demanding. The domains of language represent all the ways in which we understand and use oral and written language. Each component of language- phonology, orthography, semantics, syntax, morphology, and pragmatics- is governed by a set a rules that must be learned in order to use language correctly. An understanding of the domains of language will help students progress in reading fluency as they are able to understand the various aspects of the words they read. Educators should be able to explain why all component skills for reading development must become accurate and rapid to support more advanced reading skills. Furthermore, they should know and apply in practice considerations for text reading fluency as an achievement of normal reading development that can be advanced through informed instruction and progress monitoring. This results in the ability to identify and define the components of reading fluency including accuracy, rate, and prosody.

Session Objectives:

• Know/apply in practice considerations for role of fluent word-level skills in automatic word reading, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and motivation to read.
• Know/apply in practice considerations for text reading fluency as an achievement of normal reading development that can be advanced through informed instruction and progress-monitoring practices.