English L2 Fluency

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 10

Salient Points:

How do we get our learners to acquire automaticity to be come fluent readers and expert decision makers?

Comprehensive reading instruction leads to reading improvement and changes in brain function. It creates linguistic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, fluency, and reading comprehension. We need to give a balanced approach of bottom-up and top-down strategies.

Listening comprehension: The first step is segmentation skills and practicing sounding out words without worrying about mistakes in pronunciation. Teachers should provide feedback on the phoneme-grapheme connection.

Fluency: automaticity should be the goal for reading instruction and not oral fluency. Oral fluency tests used as a measure for assessment is not always the best case for ELLs. They need to be assessed against each other and not against native speakers.

Oral fluency: Oral fluency is more difficult than silent reading. ELLs need the cultural background and world knowledge to understand syntax and words, and bottom-level letters and sounds. They need to learn the knowledge of English and basic and common vocabulary. They also need to be taught about punctuation. Too often, ELLs struggle with punctuation, as is evident in the run-on sentences in their writing and their irregular patterns of speech. Teaching them punctuation will help solve those problems.

Some strategies to think about are:

• word callers--reading word by word is counterproductive. Readers should read phrase by phrase.
• eye movement--readers should minimize regressive eye moments and whispering (subvocalization). This will only slow them down.
• Teachers should allow wait time. They can also ignore omitted words or substituted words if the meaning is intact. They should then model to-down strategies to help fix the problem.
• Reading tasks should cover intensive practice with the passage with repeated exposure to it. The students will become familiar with the text and be more comfortable reading aloud.
• Teachers should teach about reading rate and phrasing (chunking).

Implications:

• If teachers want to teach fluency, they should not focus on perfect pronunciation in the beginning. They should get their students to start reading at a faster rate and not subvocalize as much.

• Students should focus on learning phrasing, intonation and stress. To achieve these skills, teachers can teach reading strategies such as chunking and paying attention to punctuation.

• Choral reading can help students practice oral fluency and it will lower the affective filter of the low-level readers, as they can hear more advanced students read and practice along with them. Teachers should focus on lowering the affective filter and making the oral reading environment comfortable for their students.

• Good oral fluency can attribute to good silent reading fluency as well. "It may also be the case that oral reading fluency contributes to general oral fluency in speaking; the better one can read out loud, the better one can use intonation, pronunciation, and proper rate in speech" (pp. 174).

• Teachers must revise their assessments and advocate on behalf of their ELLs to the administrators. ELLs are unfairly compared to native speakers, however their learning processes are different than native speakers'. There is some interference that causes struggle.