Why Your 'Good Decoders' Still Can't Understand What They Read
Here's a statistic from the US that stopped me in my tracks - and made me wonder why we're not asking the same questions in the UK.
The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study - the largest American study of its kind - found that when comparing struggling readers to proficient ones, the biggest gaps weren't in word recognition accuracy. They were in automaticity and prosody - the components of fluency.
Struggling readers could often decode correctly. They just couldn't do it fluently enough to comprehend.
I'll be honest. I didn't understand fluency until our school improvement partner Jamie introduced it to us and then I found this research which doubled down on what he was saying. I thought fluent reading just meant accurate reading. If a child could decode the words, job done.
Then I looked at the children in my own school. The ones who'd sailed through phonics screening but read like robots. Every. Word. Separate. No expression. No flow. Technically correct, but somehow wrong.
The US research described exactly what I was seeing in Surrey.
Professor Tim Rasinski's work finally made sense of it. He describes fluency as "the bridge between decoding and comprehension" - built from two components: automaticity (effortless word recognition) and prosody (expressive reading that reflects meaning).
Without that bridge, children fall into the gap.
The science is unambiguous. A 2014 study by Paige and Rasinski found that automaticity and prosody explained over 50% of the variance in silent reading comprehension. Crucially, prosody acted as a partial mediator between word recognition and understanding — meaning expressive reading isn't just pleasant to hear, it's functional for comprehension.
Rasinski's insight cuts to the heart of it: "The goal of phonics instruction is to get students not to use it." If children are still consciously decoding, their working memory is consumed by the mechanical act of reading. Nothing's left for meaning-making.
Tim Shanahan, former director of reading for Chicago schools, took this seriously. He mandated equal instructional time on phonics and fluency daily. The results were exceptional.
Meanwhile, in UK primary schools, we rarely assess fluency systematically. We check phonics. We test comprehension. But the bridge between them? We assume it builds itself.
It doesn't.
So what changed in my school?
We started assessing fluency explicitly - not just "can they decode?" but "how do they sound?" We listen for natural phrasing, expression that matches meaning, pace that sounds like talking rather than sounding out.
We built in daily fluency practice. Choral reading. Echo reading. Readers' theatre. Research by Young and Rasinski shows these approaches improve not just fluency, but word recognition, phonics, and comprehension too.
The children who were stuck - good decoders with poor comprehension - started making progress. Because we finally understood what they actually needed.
The US has been researching this for decades. The UK is only just waking up to it.
How many children in your school are waiting for that same realisation?
Start with our free 2-Minute Fluency Spot Check - a one-page guide to what to listen for.
Research Sources Referenced
2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study White, S., Sabatini, J., Park, B. J., Chen, J., Bernstein, J., & Li, M. (2021). The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study (NCES 2021-025). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/orf/2021025_orf_study.pdf
Paige & Rasinski (2014) — Prosody and automaticity study Paige, D. D., Rasinski, T., Magpuri-Lavell, T., & Smith, G. S. (2014). Interpreting the relationships among prosody, automaticity, accuracy, and silent reading comprehension in secondary students. Journal of Literacy Research, 46(2), 123-156.
Tim Rasinski — "Bridge between decoding and comprehension" concept Rasinski, T. V. (2010). The Fluent Reader (2nd ed.). Scholastic. Also: Rasinski, T. V. (2004). Assessing Reading Fluency. Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.
Young & Rasinski (2019) — Readers' theatre research Young, C., Durham, P., Miller, M., Rasinski, T., & Lane, F. (2019). Improving reading comprehension with readers theater. Journal of Educational Research, 112(5), 615-626.
Tim Shanahan — Equal time for phonics and fluency Referenced in multiple Rasinski interviews and publications; implemented during Shanahan's tenure as Director of Reading, Chicago Public Schools.