ASCD November 2006 Volume 64 Number 3 NCLB Taking Stock Looking Forward Page 1 of 4 Pages 74 78 A Tale of Unintended Consequences Jennifer Corn An ESL teacher finds that pressure to raise reading rates has kept her from meeting students true needs November 2006 On your marks get set go I started my timer and circulated around the room listening as students hurriedly began reading aloud to their partners who followed along on their own copies After one minute I told everyone to stop and asked the listening partners to point out any errors the speed reader had made Then these 4th graders added up the number of words they had read accurately in a minute and recorded the number in their personal reading fluency logs Murmurs of pride and frustration could be heard around the room as some students saw evidence of growth and others found they were reading no faster than before This was a typical fluency practice session a daily routine I instituted with a group of 4th graders at Gold Hills Elementary School 1 to whom I was providing English language arts instruction within a bilingual program All 17 students were native Spanish speakers and 12 were classified as Limited English Proficient Their 4th grade year was the first time these students had received language arts instruction in English instead of Spanish The fluency drills were an attempt to raise students scores on my school district s reading fluency assessment This assessment was one of six assessments of language arts skills associated with the Open Court reading system that my district required teachers to administer five times during the year The other assessments tested reading comprehension grammar and usage skills writing vocabulary and spelling For the fluency assessment I listened to students read two different unfamiliar grade level passages for one minute each and recorded the number of words they read accurately I then entered the students average words per minute into a districtwide database Why Fluency and Why Speed Administrators were closely watching my school s assessment results in 2004 2005 Gold Hills was a Year 4 Program Improvement School under No Child Left Behind NCLB This meant that our school was threatened with closure or conversion to a charter school if we didn t improve our math and language arts scores on the California Standards Test CST By midyear when few of my students had achieved the benchmark for reading fluency I responded to the pressure by instituting fluency practice sessions District leaders chose fluency as a focus because they considered reading rate which is part of fluency a reliable predictor of success on the English Language Arts section of the CST Proponents of instruction in reading fluency point to the importance of automaticity the ability to http www ascd org portal site ascd template MAXIMIZE menuitem 459dee008f99653f 11 27 2006 ASCD Page 2 of 4 decode words quickly and effortlessly Both Clark 1995 and Rasinski 2003 argue that becoming a fluent reader is a matter of making decoding routine so that the reader can direct his or her conscious attention to comprehending the text Hudson Lane and Pullen 2005 cite a correlation between reading rate and comprehension and argue that automaticity frees the reader to focus on understanding the text and that reading rate is a useful measure of a student s automaticity However fluency is not only about speed it also involves phrasing expressiveness and the ultimate goal of improving comprehension Moreover Rasinski 2003 warns that although reading rate appears to be a good measure of the decoding automaticity component of reading fluency and of reading achievement in general it does not mean that students should receive overt and intensive instruction and practice in becoming fast readers If teachers provide the kind of instruction in fluency that works then fluency comprehension and rate will improve If teachers choose instead to focus primarily on developing students reading rate at the expense of reading with expression meaning and comprehension students may read fast but with insufficient comprehension p 8 Ironically the message I received from my district that I should explicitly teach my students to read faster led me to institute just the sort of instruction Rasinski cautions against What the Focus on Speed Yielded At the end of the 2004 05 school year I looked back to see whether Rasinski s caution had been apt or whether the speed drills had led my 4th graders to read better overall and perform better on the state test I found that instruction aimed at helping students read more quickly did not have a significant effect on their overall reading skills Most students made minimal progress in increasing their reading speed Further even the few who did meet the district s benchmark for 4th grade reading speed 117 words per minute did not consistently score higher on other reading tests including the language arts section of the CST The Fast Get Faster In June 2005 when I administered the final of my five rounds of timed fluency assessment I celebrated my students success 6 of 17 had finally reached the district s benchmark This represented a dramatic improvement over the previous four rounds when only one student met the benchmark As I looked more deeply into my data however some disturbing trends became clear Those six students who met the district s goal started the year reading much more quickly than most of their classmates and had stronger English skills I was even more upset to discover that those six students made twice as much growth in reading rate as did the rest of the class As a group their average change from round one to round five was 37 words per minute By contrast the average change among the below benchmark students was only 18 words per minute and five students improved fewer than 12 words per minute Although an intense focus on reading speed had supported six students dramatic growth I had allowed many students to stagnate as I provided them with inappropriate instruction But the Test Scores Don t Follow Considering my district administrators emphasis on boosting reading rate I expected to see an obvious correlation between my students success on the timed fluency test and their success on other reading assessments Instead when I examined how students fluency scores related to their scores on the Open Court reading comprehension assessment and the CST I found unpredictable results The students who read the