Developing fluency in reading - Compass Pub



Fluency practice in the four skills

Paul Nation

LALS, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Fluency involves making the best use of what is already known.

The four strands

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.

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 is no unfamiliar language, and there are largely familiar content and 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.

You can decide if an activity is a fluency development activity by seeing if it involves these four conditions.

Listening fluency

Listening to easy stories

The teacher reads an interesting graded reader aloud to the learners as a serial, reading a few pages each day. As the learners get used to the story the teacher gradually speeds up the reading.

Repeated listening to CDs

The learners listen to CDs that come with graded readers. They listen to the same story several times over several days until it is easy to listen to.

Focused repeated listening

The teacher writes the numbers from 1 to 10 on the board and then says them quickly in a random order while a learner points to them. Then the learners do this in pairs. The activity continues for several minutes until the learners are starting to get faster at recognizing the numbers.

Speaking fluency

4/3/2

The learners work in pairs. Learner A talks to learner B on a very familiar topic for four minutes. At the end of four minutes the teacher stops them and tells them to change partners. Then learner A gives exactly the same talk to their new partner for three minutes. They change partners once again and learner A for the third time gives exactly the same talk to their new partner for two minutes. Then it is learner B’s turn.

The best recording

The learner makes a recording of a short text. Then she listens to it and then re-records it until she is satisfied that this is her best recording of it.

Reading fluency

A speed reading course

The learners read very easy passages which are all the same length and record their speed on a graph. They answer multiple-choice questions and record their comprehension score on a graph. For speed reading courses in a controlled vocabulary see Nation & Malarcher (2007) and Paul Nation’s website.

Table 1: A graph showing a gradual increase in reading speed

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 small-time investment brings large benefits.

Easy extensive reading

The learners quickly read lots of easy graded readers that are way below their level.

Repeated reading

Each learner reads the same short text three times in immediate succession. This activity can be done silently or reading aloud.

Writing fluency

10 minute writing

The learners write for exactly 10 minutes on a very familiar topic. They count the number of words they wrote and put the number on a graph. The teacher does NOT correct their work but praises them for quantity of writing and responds positively to the content of the writing. The learners do this kind of writing two or three times a week.

Linked skills

The learners work on the same material through three successive skills, for example (1) they read the material, (2) then they listen to it, and (3) then they write about it. There are many such combinations. The last activity in each series becomes a fluency development activity because of the previous practice in the other two skills.

Typically, fluency activities not only result in fluency increases (speed in words per minute, reduction in hesitations), but also are accompanied by improvements in accuracy and complexity.

One quarter of the total time in a language course should be spent on fluency activities.

The effects of fluency development

Fluency development activities can have the following effects. They can be measured by comparing the four minute talk with the two minute talk.

1 They develop fluency. That is, learners can comprehend or produce more quickly and without a lot of hesitation.

2 They result in increased accuracy. In the repeated parts of the talk, the number of errors typically reduce.

3 They result in increased complexity. Learners use two or three more complex constructions in the two minute talk, such as relative clauses or subordinate or coordinated clauses.

The changes in accuracy and complexity are not the result of new learning but are the effect of being truly in control of the speaking task.

How could you look for these effects in the classroom, and when doing research?

Tasks

1 Analyse one of the activities using the four conditions.

2 Design a linked skills activity.

3 Do the focused repeated listening activity in pairs using numbers. What other content could be used for this activity?

References

Chang, A. C-S. (2010) The effect of a timed reading activity on EFL learners: Speed, comprehension, and perceptions. Reading in a Foreign Language 22, 2: 284-303.

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, I.S.P. (2007) The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1, 1: 1-12.

Nation, I.S.P. (1989) Improving speaking fluency. System 17, 3: 377-384.

Nation, P. & Malarcher, C. (2007) Reading for Speed and Fluency, Books 1, 2, 3 & 4 Seoul: Compass Publishing.

Nation, I.S.P. and Newton, J. (2008) Teaching ESL/EFL Speaking and Reading. New York: Routledge.

Paul Nation’s website

(Vocabulary Resource Booklet, publications, speed reading course, Vocabulary Size Test)

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download