Looking Backward: Reflections on a Career in Reading

Abstract

When I agreed to do an article that would capture the essence of my research, I did not realize how hard it would be. What made the task difficult was that I was not sure how to write the article in an interesting way. I thought a descriptive narrative of my work might be about as interesting as reading the phone directory. As I considered this problem, I realized that a presentation of my work against the backdrop of the history of reading and writing might be appealing. This history could take the long view as well as the short view.The long view is driven by the fact that I have studied the history of writing, and this history can be traced back thousands of years. The short view is driven by the fact that although my research on reading goes back only 40 years, during this short span of time academic psychology has gone through three paradigm shifts. Additionally, the field of reading has experienced some important wars (captured in the title of Chall's, 1967, classic book Learning to Read: The Great Debate). What follows, then, is a brief overview of the history of writing as well as a description of my work on fluency. A history of writing is included because it reflects my personal view on this important aspect of reading.

Improving Oral Fluency of EFL Students with Different Proficiency Levels through Explicit Instruction of Face Threatening Strategies

“…Giving continued practice and successive exposure to the targeted tasks (Samuels, 2006) in the study lead to automaticity and fluency in the results. By giving explicit FTA instruction to the students we gave them the opportunity to practice them to become automatic (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003;Rasinski, 2006).…”

“…Additionally, explicit instruction may eventually lead to more learner automaticity and fluency. Current studies show that automaticity and fluency is the by-product of continued practice and successive exposure to the targeted tasks (Samuels, 2006). Differently stated, students should be given multiple opportunities to practice the assigned activities…”

The Efficacy of Repeated Reading on Secondary Students' Oral Reading Fluency and Retell Fluency

“…The research also demonstrated that scholars have some differing views on the exact ways that fluency develops (Rasinski, 2012;Samuels, 2006;Hudson et al, 2009; Nichol et al, 2012).…”

“…Researchers believed that fluency plays a critical role as the bridge or gateway that allows student to make meaning (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2010;Rasinski, 2012). The research also demonstrated that scholars have some differing views on the exact ways that fluency develops (Rasinski, 2012;Samuels, 2006;Hudson et al, 2009; Nichol et al, 2012).Some asserted a bottom-up view, while others chose a top-down view. In the predominant view, however, readers must attain automaticity at the word recognition level in order to free cognitive resources for comprehension (Rasinski, 2012;Samuels, 2006).…”

“…Readers attain this automaticity over time through repeated practice in which proper reading is teacher-directed and modeled (Kostewicz, 2012;Paige et al, 2012;Rasinski, 2012). Although prosody was not explored in depth, the literature review acknowledged that it also plays a vital role in comprehension (Kuhn et al 2009).Reading scholars considered RR to be a well-known, proven instructional technique to improve reading fluency (Kostewicz, 2012;Samuels, 2006;Shanahan, 2006; Therrien et al., 2012). Some researchers agreed that fluency instruction and assessment should include a comprehension component, or fluency instruction and assessment just became a speed reading task (Bellinger & DiPerna, 2011;Rasinski, 2012;Samuels, 2006).…”