Should We Be Using Words Correct Per Minute?

I have recently been working to strengthen my daughter’s iep goals. She can decode but struggles with comprehension. Tim Rasinki’s work helped me understand the relationship of fluency to comprehension (thank you Amplify podcast!). She has always struggled with comprehension but prosody/fluency have never been brought up or used in her iep goals—I suspect many middle school teachers are not thinking about fluency, especially in terms of oral expression. I also think that making sure goals are “measurable” can lead to easily collectible data, like WCPM. I tried to add Tim Rasinki’s fluency rubric as a measure—fingers crossed. Thank you for your insight!

ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! I tutor Spanish-speaking middle schoolers. When asked to replicate a "words per minute" test, they read all the easy words and JUMP RIGHT OVER or make an unintelligible sound in place of any word they don't know. Zero comprehension, zero motivation to tackle unfamiliar words. In slower reading for comprehension, they do the same thing. I always ask what they do if they don't know a word. "I call my cousin." "I ask my sister." I now buy a used Spanish dictionary for every student and teach them how to use it. I tell them they have to read all the words to comprehend or school will be unsuccessful. But I teach them which kinds of words do not have to be looked up, when it is safe to guess or not care. EX. "...The scent of the bbq wafts through the trees." The animal was big, hairy, dangerous and [...]." It's still a lot of work so I wonder how often they take my advice.

It pains me that fluency and word recognition have been lauded as the determiners of reading ability in my state. I attended your webinar on Text Complexity and Reading Levels, and I recognize the argument that errors due to speed may not interfere with comprehension. That's a message I want the teachers in my literacy courses (assessments and disciplinary literacy) to focus on; much learning happens from reading in spite of word errors.

I taught high school, and I still had students struggling with fluency because of the emphasis in the elementary grades on being able to pronounce words over being able to understand them. Because this emphasis happens in the early, formative years while their brains are still developing, it becomes the "normal" way to approach reading. A shift towards comprehension and understanding will, in the long run, benefit students more, because those are the habits they will carry into the secondary grade levels and beyond.

In the Netherlands "the words correct per minute (WCPM) measure" is used to discover the children with dyslexia. We now have a larger number children with a diagnosis than could be expected from research. Suppose we don't use this measure anymore, would it decrease the number of dyslexia diagnosis I wonder? Or, is there a relation between dyslexia en pushing children to read as fast as they can?

Prosody comes from understanding the text. I teach a course titled "Teaching Phonics-Basic and Beyond." The basic phonics of this letter "says" this, needs to be taught WITH the caveat of USUALLY and the need to accompany that phonics with sight words that don't follow the "rules" and words used in context. Oral reading WITH the whole class and the teacher leading is so valuable. Starting the day with a poem or song READ together and short discussion of what it means, can go a long with to help students read fluently and understand what they read. [Rasinski, T.V. (2017) Readers who struggle: Why many struggle and a modest proposal for improving their reading. The Reading Teacher, 70(5), 519-525. Dooi:10.1002/trtr.1611.] Yes, the brain is required to multitask and that means giving it time to work before we expect a response from our students.

I appreciate your research and dedication to literacy.

A correction: " My dear " at the end of a blog is not appropriate.

Hanora,
If you don’t understand literary allusion you shouldn’t criticize it.

Tim

As "literacy experts" we go to great lengths in providing readers with prompts that will enable students to draw meaning from text. Tim's response to this questions is making me think about a very simple idea. Reading is a like listening. Instead of hearing what someone is saying we are reading what someone is saying. Depending on the skills of the reader, a prompt could be, "Would _________ (author, character, etc) say that?" This is another way to nudge students to attend to meaning while decoding. This could make sense for some readers. You could then move into decoding prompts if needed, again depending on the student. Keeping in mind the traits of the reader and the language we use to support them has always been an important mind set to maintain as we work to increase reading proficiency.

How you have described the use of WCPM and its usage in determining fluency progress is correct (that is, automaticity in word recognition and overall pleasing reading rate). But it is just that - a measure of one or two of the building blocks in overall fluency. The problem I am seeing, since returning to the K-12 world after spending 25+ years training preservice teachers in higher education reading instruction, is that school districts are interpreting this measure alone as a means of making some very big decisions for readers. WCPM appears to be the "do all that ends all" for deciding which tiering level a student will be placed, and whether or not he/she is making progress. Yes, it is indicative of word recognition, and yes, it can make a reader sound as if he/she knows what he/she is reading. But I see many students in 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades that have great speed and word recognition - and yet can't tell me much about what they read. All they focus on is getting the words out, and doing it fast. And they have been taught this since their years in the primary grades! Many of my middle schoolers have learned to play the game - make it sound good, and it will keep me out of the reading room! Great reading rate is serving as a mask to significant comprehension problems, particularly for older readers. We have to be very cautious in our interpretations of WCPM data!

This is very interesting. I'm focusing tuition on sentence structure while we can only meet online, including understanding independent and dependent clauses and using the passive voice. I'm mainly doing this for reading comprehension but, of course, it is also leading to stronger writing too. Ideally, this syntax work is based on the topics and projects the child is working on in class. Related to this, and necessary to bear in mind, is the specific language the child will meet in different academic subjects. A really good understanding of syllable types is helpful for developing fluency, so that is part of every lesson. For examples I can hold up in a Zoom or Messenger Kids session, I have been adapting the syllable triangles in Rasinski's Megabook of Fluency mentioned above to match the syllable types the children have learned. I find at any stage that preparing for reading by working separately on the less familiar words or phrases that will appear in the passage to be read, including exploring the meaning, has a marked impact on speed and expression. Given that even the smallest word can subtly change meaning, young readers need lots of opportunity to do this. In this way, the passage to be read is never totally unseen. Finally, going back to Rasinski's book as an example, activities that encourage modelling and experimentation with dynamics while reading do seem to raise a child's own expectations of their phrasing and expression in their reading.

A pediatrician uses inches/weight on a growth chart to monitor the health of a child (which does not diagnose the problem when a child does not follow a normal trajectory). Similarly, WCPM (given naturally) can offer a measure of student reading progress and indicate (or justify) when further testing/investigation may be necessary. Both are merely progress monitoring tools - nothing more.

Agreed. I never tell my students to read as quickly as they can during my instruction. So I am sure not to prompt them to do that in a probe. What I do say is to read smoothly, pay attention to punctuation, read in phrases, fix mistakes and move on etc. I have yet to see a “speed reader” fully comprehend a text at hand but then I’ve taught mostly novice readers. While wcpm is an indicator for instruction and student growth (and something that can be nationally normed for an additional piece of evidence) I wish there was more out there to measure comprehension for RtI purposes on a weekly basis . I weight comprehension higher but will always value both. If anything my students for the most part at least have fun with Fluency probes!

I worked in elementary schools and DIBELS tested all the elemenrary age readers. Then I went to middle schools and tested junior high readers. Then I went to alternative high schools and listened to many kids read AIMS passages and for whom reading is still hard. Guess what? The older they got, they more they thought good reading was fast word saying. I felt so sad, this is our bad.

Dear colleagues
it is good to read your comments because they are related to a study I am doing in the Netherlands. With us children have the idea that good reading is fast reading. I now follow children who no longer need to read quickly, but read according to adapted standards of about 1 word per second and we see what that does to the children.
Read about is at; https://www.pravoo.com/reading-focused-on-independence

I completely agree with what DR. Shanahan says: The problem here is that we’re using speed and many kids can read words accurately but still aren’t fluent readers. I have often thought that basing a child's reading ability through WCPM was not a "sole" indicator. I have had many students read with "super speed" yet not be able to retell anything they read. A combination of fluency (WCPM) and prosody are a great resource to attain a more accurate reading level. Yes, we want our students to read faster but they must also read with prosody to better understand the words they are reading.