SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING, 5(3), 203–210

Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Introduction to This Special Issue:

The DNA of Reading Fluency

Edward J. Kame’enui and Deborah C. Simmons

University of Oregon

In The Double Helix, James Watson (1968) recounted with compelling candor and
uncanny insight that “frightening and beautiful experience” (Feynman, as cited in
Watson, 1968, p. i) of making a truly scientific discovery. Of course, the discovery
Watson and his colleague Francis Crick made nearly 50 years ago was the dou-
ble-helical structure of DNA. For many readers, the intrigue of Watson’s personal
account is not necessarily in his discovery that four letters compose the entire al-
phabet of heredity, spelled out in a unique morphological arrangement of nucleo-
tides bonded to sugar–phosphate bases. Instead, what is particularly engaging
about Watson’s story is the genuine process of dubitation that he and the interna-
tional community of scientists (e.g., chemists, physicists, biologists in England,
France, and the United States) unwittingly revealed about the nature of scientific
inquiry, particularly the unscientific hunches that science sometimes permits when
exploring nature’s mysteries.
Throughout The Double Helix, Watson (1968) exposed his peculiar sensibility
about the structure of DNA, such as his Keatsian notions of beauty as truth and
truth as beauty. For Watson and Crick, the intrinsic elegance of the DNA structure
was obvious from the start: “The idea was so simple that it had to be right. … A
structure this pretty just had to exist” (Watson, 1968, p. 131). In the end, Watson
and Crick’s aesthetic hunches and unwieldy model building, greeted skeptically
by many prominent scientists at the time, were confirmed by bold experimental
X-ray data from other labs.
Fluent reading, like the “thread of life” itself (Kendrew, 1966), is intrinsically
elegant in both form and cadence (and perhaps biochemical valence). We certainly
know it when we see it, and we are quick to celebrate it, along with the trajectory of
success it portends. Rauding theory (Carver, 1981, 1983, 1984) notwithstanding, a
first grader orally reading a grade-level passage at an uncommon rate of 90 correct
words per minute is an awesome sight. Likewise, we readily recognize when read-
204 KAME’ENUI AND SIMMONS

ing is not fluent but is wickedly fractured and laborious in flow and purpose, when
words misfire and do not enjoy a private voice or a public audience. Anyone who
has been in the presence of a child or young adult unable to read an appropri-
ate-level passage with the words executed accurately, effortlessly, and instantly
one after another with unwavering prosody understands why reading fluency is
elusive and bewitching.
Clearly, the ability to read accurately and rapidly is so fundamental to reading
success that it just has to be right. Reading fluency, however, is not an all-or-noth-
ing proposition, even though the result (i.e., words in text read accurately and rap-
idly) is often treated as a vulgar dichotomy (e.g., fluent reader vs. nonfluent
reader). Instead, fluent reading is plainly developmental and represents an out-
come of well-specified sublexical and lexical processes and skills developed for
most children over a bounded period of pedagogical time (e.g., kindergarten to
Grade 6) and in rather complex host environments known as schools (Kame’enui,
Simmons, & Coyne, 2000; Simmons et al., 2000). What reading fluently precisely
means is not entirely clear. Even less clear are the theoretical underpinnings and
the cognitive mechanisms that best explain “the speed and effortlessness with
which [readers] seem able to breeze through text” (Adams, 1990, p. 409).
In this special issue, the historical, theoretical, empirical, and instructional
character of reading fluency are examined, but notably within the constraints of
three articles. Curiously, despite the substantial and coercive efforts in reading re-
search over the last 3 or 4 decades (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1967; National Reading
Panel, 2000; National Research Council, 1998; Stanovich, 2000), reading fluency
as a construct does not enjoy definitional, theoretical, empirical, or instructional
consensus in the research literature (see Wolf & Katzir-Cohen in this issue; see
also Nathan & Stanovich, 1991; National Reading Panel, 2000, chap. 3, p. 6). For
all intents and purposes, reading fluency is eonomine; that is, it is a term so broad
and unsatisfactory in meaning that little insight and understanding are gained be-
yond the mere use of the term.
Fluency as eonomine, for example, is revealed in the National Reading Panel’s
(2000) historical analysis of the term and its application. Specifically, the National
Reading Panel traced the “changing concepts of fluency” from “high-speed word
recognition” fluency, which marks the release of a reader from the algorithm of
lower level subskills processing implicated in decoding to fluency that extends
“beyond word recognition” to “comprehension processes as well” (chap. 3, p. 6).
In addition, the National Reading Panel noted that “there has been a high degree of
overlap in the use of the terms such as ‘automaticity’ and ‘fluency’” (chap. 3, p. 7).
The historical blurring of these terms began, in part, with the early emphasis on
word recognition derived from LaBerge and Samuels’ (1985) commitment to the
role of attention mechanisms in information processing and their interest in captur-
ing “the basic principles of automaticity in perceptual and associative processing”
(p. 692). Interestingly, the National Reading Panel did not resolve the definitional
 INTRODUCTION 205

ambiguity between automaticity and fluency but instead offered an interesting de-
mur that reinforced the interchangeable use of the terms. In the report,
automaticity was viewed as “a continuum rather than a dichotomy,” and “the im-
portance of thinking of fluency as a continuum” (chap. 3, p. 8) was also conceded.
The National Reading Panel’s (2000) overall analysis of fluency research was unam-
biguous in the prominent role it assigned to the development of efficient or high-speed
word recognition skills and the importance of “increased practice and repeated expo-
sures to the words in the texts that the student reads” (chap. 3, p. 8). It appears clear and
unyielding that practice and exposure to print is essential to fluency (Adams, 1990; An-
derson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988; Biemiller, 1977–1978; Nathan & Stanovich, 1991).
However, the cognitive mechanisms and processes that index and service fluency ap-
pear to be unsettled theoretically and experimentally (National Reading Panel, 2000;
Stanovich, 2000) even though both persuasive and empirical evidence appear to support
Logan’s (1988) instance theory of automatization, which asserted

There is also evidence that automaticity is acquired only in consistent task environ-
ments, as when stimuli are mapped consistently onto the same responses throughout
practice. Most of the properties of automaticity develop through practice in such envi-
ronments. (p. 492)

This instance theory of automatization argues against resource limitation and

for automatization that is “item-based (rather than process-based)” and involves
“learning specific responses for specific stimuli” (Logan, 1988, p. 494). The learn-
ing mechanism implied is one that relies on the “accumulation of separate episodic
traces with experience—that produces a gradual transition from algorithmic pro-
cessing to memory-based processing” (Logan, 1988, p. 493). To wit, the National
Reading Panel’s quantitative research synthesis reported on the effectiveness of
two major instructional approaches to fluency development (i.e., repeated oral
reading practice or guided repeated oral reading practice and formal strategies that
encourage students to read more independently) because “there is common agree-
ment that fluency develops from reading practice” (chap. 3, p. 1). But exactly how
does this fluency develop? Under what practice or instructional conditions and at
what levels necessary to access meaning? For what readers, under what text and
task conditions, and at what criterion levels of performance? Furthermore, to what
extent is it necessary to develop automaticity of sublexical and lexical units prior
to developing fluency with connected text? How frequently must words occur in
connected text to gain automaticity over what conditions of exposure? What in-
vestment in reading fluency is needed at what grade levels and how would the em-
phasis on fluency shift over time?
In short, the DNA of reading fluency remains uncharted territory conceptually,
theoretically, experimentally, pedagogically, and instructionally. Like Watson and
Crick, we know the idea has to be right, but ideation alone is insufficient to ad-
206 KAME’ENUI AND SIMMONS

vance a society committed to the scientific study of ideas, particularly in reading.

Collectively, we have much work to do to understand fully the features, mecha-
nisms, and processes unique to reading fluency. Of course, gaining clarity and
agreement on the meaning of fluency is an important first step in this work. Al-
though the authors in this special issue are not consistently conspicuous on this
matter, all implicitly call for recasting, if not reconceptualizing, fluency as both a
construct and an index. For example, casting fluency without accuracy ostensibly
exposes fluency as an empty construct, a word in name only. Fluency as an index
of sheer speed without accuracy is a reckless indicator of processing, cognitive or
otherwise. Instead, fluency should always serve to index both accuracy and speed.
However trite this assertion appears, in the context of schools as complex host en-
vironments, accuracy and fluency are often treated as separate indexes of reading
performance and competence.
Similarly, casting accuracy without fluency invariably exposes accuracy as an
inflated construct, a word that constrains how we think about reading performance
and competence as indicators of general human performance (see Fuchs, Fuchs,
Hosp, & Jenkins in this issue). For example, a first-grade child who reads 65 cor-
rect words with five errors in 1 min on a grade-level passage at the end of the
school year represents a very different kind of reader than a first-grade child who
reads 65 correct words with five errors in 4 min on the same passage. Both readers
are reasonably accurate. However, assessing accuracy without fluency provides an
incomplete picture of reading competence and limits potentially meaningful infor-
mation for designing and delivering instruction. In fact, all authors in this special
issue argue for using fluency as an index of accuracy and speed and as a primary
indicator of reading competence.
In addition, the authors call for expanding fluency beyond a measure of text
speed and accuracy, to encompass prelexical components of word recognition,
such as onset–rime, phonemic segmentation, and letter–sound correspondences.
As such, fluency can be extended to index the speed and accuracy not just of words
but of the constituent phonologic and alphabetic elements that compose words. For
example, phonemic segmentation fluency would index the correct number of pho-
nemes that compose a consonant-vowel-consonant word (e.g., sun) segmented in 1
min and without access to a print representation of the word. This kind of
fine-grain fluency index holds enormous implications for monitoring the progress
of beginning readers in the early and critical algorithmic stages of reading, where
the “power-function speed-up processing” (Logan, 1988, p. 495) as a result of
practice can be indexed periodically using multiple alternate forms of a phonemic
segmentation fluency measure (see Good, Simmons, & Kame’enui in this issue).
Indeed, the simplicity and elegance of reading fluency betray its complexity.
Historically and theoretically it may be more akin to the complex threads of the
Gordian knot than to the helical structure of DNA (although a spiral structure of
fluency in which accuracy and speed serve as the two backbones of fluent reading
 INTRODUCTION 207

makes for an expressive, but transparent, metaphor). For many practitioners, re-
searchers, and children, fluency is the Gordian knot of reading competence. Al-
though the three articles in this special issue do not disentangle all the complex
threads of reading fluency, they do provide readers a serious examination of some
of the more substantive conceptual, theoretical, and psychometric issues surround-
ing reading fluency. In addition, the authors offer important ways of thinking dif-
ferently about reading fluency.
In the first article, Wolf and Katzir-Cohen grapple directly with the nature of
reading fluency, arguing that “macrolevel fluency is based on automaticity of
microlevel subskills and their connections” (p. 215). Of course, this argument is
made the way only Wolf can make it by providing readers an alluring and instruc-
tive history of the theories and models that best represent fluency research, begin-
ning with Cattell and Huey and ending with the National Reading Panel’s (2000)
report. This historical journey sets the stage for Wolf and Katzir-Cohen’s provoca-
tive “working definition” of reading fluency and subsequent components analysis
of the structure of fluency. Based on this analysis, Wolf and Katzir-Cohen con-
clude “that reading fluency involves every process and subskill involved in read-
ing” (p. 220), and as such, mischief and inefficiencies are possible from multiple
sources and across a continuum of processes. The authors, however, are not de-
terred by this perceived conspiracy of components and processes in the develop-
ment of reading fluency. Instead, in the final section of their article, they offer
readers a conceptual framework and a description of an experimental fluency pro-
gram designed to “squarely confront the complexity and developmental changes
in fluency development” (p. 230).
According to Wolf and Katzir-Cohen, fluency intervention requires greater in-
tensity and more explicit attention to the sublexical and lexical (e.g., word-reading
efficiency) requirements of reading than we realize. As an example of the kind of
fluency intervention necessary, the authors describe the RAVE-O program, which
stands for Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary, Elaboration, and Orthography.
The architecture of this program appears to hold great promise for building fluency
within and between phonologic, orthographic, and semantic systems for children
at risk of reading difficulties.
In contrast to Wolf and Katzir-Cohen, who focus on fluency writ large, L.
Fuchs, D. Fuchs, Hosp, and Jenkins focus in the second article on a particular form
of reading fluency well established in reading research: oral reading fluency
(ORF). These authors conceptualize ORF as “the speed with which text is repro-
duced into spoken language” (p. 241) and “indexed (or counted) as words read cor-
rectly per minute” (p. 242). Readers unfamiliar with this construct and metric will
find the authors’ theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis provocative and
persuasive. Fuchs et al. reason that reading aloud fluently serves to reveal, albeit
indirectly, a reader’s reading competence on a range of lexical dimensions, includ-
ing word-level processing, a lexicon of accessible words, and text comprehension.
208 KAME’ENUI AND SIMMONS

In practice, a high number of words read correctly per minute, when placed in the
proper developmental perspective, indicate efficient word-level processing, a ro-
bust vocabulary knowledge base, and meaningful comprehension of the text. In
contrast, a low ORF rate suggests inefficient word recognition skills, a lean or im-
poverished vocabulary, and faulty text comprehension skills.
The authors describe a range of evidence on the viability and validity of ORF
when compared (a) with more “direct” measures of reading comprehension, (b) to
isolated word-reading fluency, and (c) to accuracy scores. In addition, the authors
summarize a database that compares silent reading fluency and ORF as “correlates
of reading comprehension performance” (p. 245). They also examine the actual
use of ORF measures in practice and report its limited impact. Finally, Fuchs et al.
provide readers an array of strategies for using ORF as an indicator of reading
competence, including a method known as curriculum-based measurement.
In the third and final article, Good, Simmons, and Kame’enui offer readers an-
other fluency metric that is predicated on a set of phonologic and alphabetic tasks
deemed predictive of advanced reading processes such as reading comprehension.
Good et al. describe a set of 1-min fluency measures designed to evaluate begin-
ning readers’ ability to negotiate both the phonologic and alphabetic requirements
of reading, such as onset-rime, phonemic segmentation, pseudoword reading, and
ORF. They discuss the use of these measures in predicting the outcome perfor-
mance of third-grade readers on a high-stakes, statewide reading achievement test.
Good et al. complement the high-stakes accountability movement in schools
with a prevention-oriented assessment and intervention model that links three big
ideas in beginning reading (i.e., phonological awareness, alphabetic understand-
ing, and fluency with connected text) to specific fluency-based measures. Through
the use of Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, they specify and ex-
amine the utility of a measurement timeline for the acquisition of reading skills
necessary to meet expectations on high-stakes measures of reading outcomes.
They apply this model in a study of four cohorts of kindergarten through Grade 3
students and demonstrate vividly the linkages between children’s performance on
earlier fluency measures with later fluency measures and a high-stakes Grade 3
reading outcome measure. For example, 96% of the third-grade students who
achieved the benchmark goal on ORF in the spring of third grade met or exceeded
expectations on the high-stakes Oregon Statewide Assessment test. In an era of
high-stakes accountability, this kind of assessment system is essential for linking
student performance to content standards and instruction.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to our own review, each article in this special issue received a minimum
of three external, blind peer reviews. We were enormously fortunate to benefit from
 INTRODUCTION 209

the expertise and insight of the following reviewers who were extraordinarily help-
ful and flexible: Virginia Berninger, University of Washington; Patricia Bowers,
University of Waterloo; Douglas W. Carnine, University of Oregon; Lois Dreyer,
Southern Connecticut State University; Barbara Gunn, Oregon Research Institute;
Jan Hasbrouck, Texas A & M University; Kathy Howe, St. Croix River Education
District; Asha Jitendra, Lehigh University; Rollanda O’Connor, University of
Pittsburgh; Louise Spear-Swerling, Southern Connecticut State University; Janet
Spector, University of Maine; Deborah Speece, University of Maryland; and Jo-
seph Torgesen, Florida State University.

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