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Friday stream K Session 17.45 - 18.30 Length 25 minutes

On Issues of Time, Fluency, and Intervention

Maryanne Wolf and Beth O'Brien

Tufts University, USA mwolf@emerald.tufts.edu

Abstract

A new emphasis on reading fluency, automaticity, and the skills and processes contributing to them has begun in reading research. It is motivated by several important bodies of evidence: 1) that a second core deficit -- in processes underlying naming speed -- characterizes the majority of impaired readers, particularly in languages with more regular orthographies; 2) that subtypes of impaired readers can be differentiated according to the presence, absence, or combination of phonological-based and naming-speed deficits; and 3) that some impaired readers appear insufficiently remediated by intervention focused largely on phonological processes. In this paper I will review the history of research on this second core deficit and connect it to a new form of intervention based on a comprehensive approach to the development of fluency and automaticity in underlying reading processes and skills.

One of the most thought-provoking remarks about dyslexia was made some years ago by British psychologist, Andrew Ellis (1985), who said: "Whatever dyslexia may turn out to be, it is not a reading disorder." Ellis' prescient remark is supported both by evolutionary logic and the neuroimaging research of recent years. The human brain was never prewired to read, and there are no "reading centers" in the same way that there are cortical centers committed to speech and language comprehension. Rather, as the imaging work instructs us, reading is a three-ring cortical, subcortical, mid-brain, and cerebellar parallel-processing act, which makes biologically novel use of no fewer than seventeen regions in the brain, and integrates them in milliseconds (Shaywitz, Shaywitz, Pugh, Fulbright, Constable, Mencl, Shankweiler, Liberman, Skudlarski, Fletcher, Katz, Marchione, Lacadie, Gatenby, & Gore, 1998).

Put another way, sensu Ellis, reading is a vivid example of the brain's Picasso-like capacities to create an evolutionarily new function from other things: like seeing small visual features, hearing discrete sounds, and retrieving names for things. For some years we have argued that the failure to acquire reading in developmental dyslexia and less severe reading disabilities can be based either on an impediment in one of the regions responsible for doing these "other things", and/or on the ability of these regions to work automatically and in precisely timed synchrony (Wolf, 1991; Wolf & Bowers, 1999). This is because reading requires not only that all its underlying processes operate accurately, but also that these processes function at almost unimaginably rapid rates. Without the development of what Sir Edmund Huey in 1908 and LaBerge and Samuels (1974) called "automaticity" in underlying processes, the entire reading system could never attain fluency and comprehension. And, the end of all our labors -- whether, in the research laboratory or in classrooms across the world -- is a child who reads not only accurately, but also fluently with comprehension.

Despite this rather obvious fact, for more than two decades many of us have largely focused only on the achievement of accuracy in word recognition processes in reading acquisition (Breznitz, in press). More specifically, we have been investigating phonological processes as the major, core deficit in developmental dyslexia. Indeed, the systematic research in the relationship between phonological awareness processes and reading disability is referred to by Stanovich (1992) as one of the real "success stories in science." And rightly so.

But a few of us have been following "a different lead", if you will, about a second core-deficit and different source of breakdown in dyslexia: the idea that some children have fundamental difficulties in developing sufficiently rapid processing rates in the components necessary for fluent reading and reading comprehension. Further, there is now a long line of research indicating that these rate-of-processing problems are best indexed by serial naming speed. This essay represents something between a story of "the second deficit" and the introduction to what we think of as a new chapter in reading disabilities research: the linking of what we know about this second core deficit to problems in reading fluency and comprehension. Toward that end, the paper will be divided into three sections. First, we will describe some of the naming-speed research that led to the conceptualization of a second core deficit. Second, we will discuss the Double-Deficit Hypothesis, with its integration of phonological and naming-speed research, and the implications of this hypothesis for diagnosis and intervention. Finally, we will link the latter research to issues of reading fluency and its intervention.

The History of the Second Core Deficit

To begin, the hypothesis that speed of processing could play a major role in dyslexia was borne out of early work in the neurosciences by Norman Geschwind (1974), Martha Denckla (1972) and Rita Rudel (Denckla & Rudel, 1976), and also out of still earlier work in physiology by Donald Hebb (1949). Hebb contributed perhaps the most basic plank underpinning the work to be presented here on fluency. He modelled at the neuronal level how individual cells learn to work together as cell assemblies or working units to increase the automaticity and process-efficiency of various functions.

An example from the visual system will be helpful. Hebb argued that the result of cell assemblies in visual perception areas is a reservoir of mental representations of frequently perceived stimuli. For example, when an unknown visual stimulus is first detected by the retina, there is an activation in the visual cortex of multiple individual cells. These cells correspond to various features of the retinal image and are responsible for coding very specific types of information (e.g., horizontal, diagonal, curved lines, etc.). After multiple exposures to the same stimulus, the individual cells in the visual areas become a working unit, or cell assembly. These unified groups of neurons learn to work together in precise synchrony, so that recognition of frequently viewed stimuli (like letters) becomes so efficient, it is virtually "automatic." One result of these cell assemblies in the visual area is a reservoir of orthographic representations of practiced, frequently viewed letters, letter patterns, and words.

The second plank underlying the arguments we will be presenting here derives from more structural-level theory in behavioral neurology by Geschwind, and its application to pediatric neurology by his student Denckla. One of Geschwind's many legendary, improbable insights was that the best predictor of later reading would be a child's early capacity at color-naming. Geschwind's logic was based in part on his translation and interpretation of the first case of classic alexia (i.e., acquired reading loss resulting from brain lesion) in 1896 by Dejerine. An autopsy of Dejerine's patient revealed two lesion sites: one in the left visual or occipital area, and a second in the splenium or posterior portion of the corpus callosum (those fiber tracts connecting the two hemispheres). This combination of lesions caused alexia and impeded the French businessman-patient from either reading words or naming colors. Geschwind's analysis of the case was a precursor to many later cognitive models: because both color naming and reading were lost through these discrete lesions, both functions must use similar structures and require many of the same cognitive, linguistic and perceptual processes involved in retrieving a verbal match for a visual stimulus. If this is true, color naming ability, Geschwind reasoned, should be a good early predictor of later reading.

It was a wonderful, albeit slightly incorrect, hypothesis, which Denckla tested with a small group of dyslexic and average reading children. What she discovered was that dyslexic readers can name colors perfectly well; what they can not do is name them rapidly in comparison to their peers. This was the unlikely beginning of what is called "naming-speed research." Based on the color naming-speed finding, Denckla designed the Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks, in which the child names 50 stimuli as rapidly as possible (e.g., 5 common letters, or 5 digits, or 5 colors, or 5 pictured objects, repeated randomly 10 times on a board). Denckla and Rudel (1974, 1976a,b) found that naming speed for basic symbols differentiated dyslexic children from average readers, as well as other learning-disabled children, a conclusion also reached early on by Spring and Capps (1974).

The question for the last twenty-five years has been why, and the search for an answer has turned out to be a science story all its own. After Denckla and Rudel's findings, the story progresses with a multi-year exploration of the development of naming speed in children with and without developmental dyslexia. Results from a five-year longitudinal study by the first author, Robin Morris, and Heidi Bally indicated that differences in naming speed for children with reading disabilities were visible from the first day of kindergarten (Wolf, Bally, & Morris, 1986). Further, differences were most dramatic for letters. In other words, children with dyslexia began the school years with both a general retrieval-speed problem, and a particular difficulty with letter-naming's retrieval rate. These differences were maintained through Grade 4 for all categories, but especially for the more automatized categories of letters and numbers. We now know from researchers like Meyer, Wood, Hart, and Felton (1999) that these differences continue through Gr. 8 into adulthood (see also Scarborough & Domgaard, 1998; Wolff, 1993).

The conclusion that these data indicated another kind of deficit, independent of the well-documented phonological deficit, was challenged by Stanovich (1986). Like many others, Stanovich classified naming speed under the rubric of phonological processes. He suggested several kinds of evidence necessary to show that the processes in serial naming speed represented a truly different cognitive-core deficit from the phonological-core deficit in dyslexic children. First, naming-speed differences would have to distinguish dyslexic from reading-age matched children, in order to eliminate external factors like exposure to print. Stanovich further suggested another "proof" might be naming-speed differences between dyslexic readers and nondiscrepant poor readers. The latter children are sometimes called "garden-variety poor readers", and are characterized by poor reading that is commensurate with intelligence or achievement measures (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). This second type of evidence is potentially more difficult to obtain, since there have been no significant differences found for phonological awareness measures between discrepant and nondiscrepant readers. Yet such a dissociative finding would be even more persuasive evidence of a separate core deficit.

We pursued both of these lines of evidence. First, we analyzed our longitudinal data by comparing older dyslexic readers with children two years younger who were matched on reading level. We were able to demonstrate highly significant group differences: Gr. 4 dyslexic readers were significantly slower than Gr. 2 average readers; and Grade 3 dyslexic readers were significantly slower than Grade 1 average readers. These results clearly demonstrated that greater exposure to print could not explain the naming-speed differences, for older dyslexic children would have had comparable if not considerably more exposure than the younger average-reading children.

Secondly, we compared discrepant dyslexic and nondiscrepant poor readers and found significant differences (Wolf & Obregón, 1989; Biddle, 1996). The longitudinal analyses permitted us to observe changes over time in the naming speed of the nondiscrepant poor reader group. In Kindergarten nondiscrepant poor readers were more similar to dyslexic readers in slow naming speed (although dyslexics were still slower). By Grades 3 and 4 nondiscrepant poor readers were just like average readers, a finding also shown by Biddle (1996). In other words there appeared to be basic underlying differences in how discrepant dyslexic and nondiscrepant poor readers name letters and numbers. In a more recent study, Scarborough and Domgaard (1998) indicated that they also found no significant differences between average and nondiscrepant poor readers in letter and number naming speed; however, interestingly there were differences in object-naming speed that were related to IQ.

The next chapter in the story for us concerned the question of the relative universality of naming-speed deficits. Specifically, we wished to know whether naming speed was equally predictive in languages that have orthographies that are more regular than English, and thus have fewer phonological-based demands. Towards that end, we (Wolf, Pfeil, Lotz, & Biddle, 1994) studied German-speaking poor readers in Berlin. We found that not only did naming-speed deficits differentiate reader groups in that language, but that naming-speed performance was actually a better predictor of later reading in German than the most well-known phonological measure (a phoneme deletion task), a finding first demonstrated by Wimmer (1993). We now know that across multiple languages -- German (Näslund & Schneider, 1991; Wimmer & Hummer, 1990; Wimmer, 1993; Landerl & Wimmer, 2000; Wolf, Pfeil, Lotz & Biddle, 1994), Dutch (Van den Bos, 1998; Yap & Van der Leij, 1993, 1994), Finnish (Korhonen, 1995), and Spanish (Novoa & Wolf, 1984; Novoa, 1988) -- serial naming speed is a powerful predictor in transparent languages. The unexpected conclusion of this cross-linguistic work is that when phonological skills play a reduced role in the more transparent orthographies, naming-speed performance becomes an even stronger, more important diagnostic indicator and predictor of reading performance.

The issue for the third chapter in the story was and continues to be a perplexing one: that is, at what point in the act of rapid naming are dyslexic children impeded? We have approached this question in varied ways: e.g., an analysis of the speech stream during serial naming speed, and cognitive modeling. First, Mateo Obregón (1994) in our lab designed a sophisticated computer program to digitize the speech stream of children performing the RAN task, in order to analyze where in the speech stream dyslexics differed. We investigated a number of potential explanations offered by other researchers about the origins of naming-speed deficits, including: a) articulation; b) end-of-line scanning; and c) fatigue at the end of lines or the task. The results of these investigations indicated that there were no group differences for articulation (see, however, Snyder & Downey, 1995), end-of-line scanning, or fatigue-related effects, but rather group differences were found only for the interstimulus intervals (ISIs). The latter represents the "gap of time" between the response to one stimulus and the response to the next. Within this interstimulus gap occur multiple processes that include inhibiting the response to the previous stimulus (attentional systems within executive functions); shifting the system to anticipate and respond to the current stimulus (e.g., anticipatory facilitation, (Wood, 2000)); perceiving the current stimulus (perceptual system); and accessing and retrieving a verbal label (semantic, phonological, and lexical retrieval systems).

The results of Obregon's analysis and the cumulative results of earlier work demonstrating an independent core deficit convinced us of the necessity to look beyond previous notions of naming speed as subsumed under phonological processing. We were compelled to consider all other processes that comprise naming-speed, including nonlinguistic processes that might have little to do with reading, again, like Ellis (1985). We began to reconceptualize naming speed as a small behavioral window on the brain's ability to inhibit, activate, and integrate discrete component operations like visual and auditory perception and representation processes, along with semantic representation and retrieval processes within a very brief period of time (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). With this shift of perspective, naming speed could no longer be categorized as a phonological task, as still held by some today; rather, it appeared best conceptualized as a complex ensemble of multiple processes that clearly included, but certainly was not limited to, phonological processes. The most important conclusion derived from this alternative view of naming speed was that if it could no longer be subsumed under phonology, then there were other critical processes impeding reading in dyslexic children that had to be understood.

During this period we also constructed various cognitive models of letter-naming. These models were developed to depict the range of processes involved in naming speed and to illustrate several principles: 1) the multiple-componential nature of letter-naming speed; 2) the idea that phonological processes represent one set of processes among many that are involved in naming speed; and 3) the notion that with multiple component parts, there can be different possible sources of breakdown (for an elaborated discussion of models, see Wolf & Bowers, 1999). A broader perspective also conveys another conclusion: i.e., the components of naming speed represent a mini-version or subset of the components of reading. Within this view, both naming and reading can be considered ensembles of multiple perceptual, lexical, and motoric processes, all of whose subprocesses must function smoothly and rapidly, if the child is to produce a verbal match for an abstract, visually presented symbol.

If we conceptualize the processes underlying naming speed as a subset of the processes used by reading, then the naming-speed measure might be thought of as a simple predictor of reading before the child ever begins to acquire reading. It would appear, perhaps unsurprisingly to those of us who knew him, that Geschwind (1974) was not far off in his original, however unlikely, insight.

The Double-Deficit Hypothesis

Along with an extensive number of colleagues, we have now demonstrated in numerous studies across Canada, the United States, Israel, and many countries in Europe, that the processes underlying naming speed represent a second core deficit in dyslexia, largely independent of phonological processes (see Wolf, Bowers, & Biddle, 2000). Further, we have now shown that these problems in rate of processing stretch from kindergarten through adulthood in readers with dyslexia. Perhaps the most unexpected implication of naming-speed's relative independence from phonological deficits was that it allowed a new analysis of potential subtypes in our reading impaired populations.

With our colleague Pat Bowers, we found that within the well-known heterogeneity of dyslexic readers there are three major subtypes who can be characterized by the presence, absence, or combination of the two core deficits in phonology and naming speed. In other words, there are poor readers who have only phonological deficits without differences in naming speed. Conversely, there are readers who have adequate phonological and word attack skills, but who have early naming-speed deficits and later comprehension deficits. First described by Rudel (1985), these are the children who would be missed by the vast majority of our diagnostic batteries, because their decoding is accurate. The most intractable subtype is characterized by both deficits; children with both or "double deficits" represent the most severely impaired subtype in all aspects of reading, particularly in reading fluency.

This part of the story is what we call the Double-Deficit Hypothesis. (See Special Issue on the Double-Deficit Hypothesis in Wolf & Bowers, 2000). Extensive data now replicate the existence of these three subtypes of impaired readers, and in several language systems (e.g., German, Dutch, Finnish, and Hebrew). But, there are interesting surprises that are emerging. For example, in English, Lovett, Steinbach, and Frijters (2000) studied a large sample of clinically referred severely impaired readers and found that more than half are double-deficit with the remainder fairly equally split across the single deficit subtypes. By contrast, Breznitz (personal correspondence, December 13, 2000) reports that out of 375 dyslexic children studied in Hebrew, the overwhelming majority would be double-deficit readers with only 15 readers classified with solely phonological deficits. Deeney, Gidney, Wolf, and Morris (1999) also report differences in subtype distribution for African-American impaired readers who speak Vernacular English. There appear far more double-deficit and phonological subtypes in this population than the distribution of subtypes for Caucasian and African-American children who do not speak Vernacular English.

The accumulating data on independent subtypes has led to the most important theoretical and applied implications of the Double-Deficit Hypothesis - that is, the necessity to understand the role of rate of processing and fluency in reading development, and the need to create reading intervention that addresses these issues. Until this time, children with single, phonological-deficits were adequately treated with current programs emphasizing phonological awareness and decoding. However, the other two subtypes with their explicit problems in naming speed and reading fluency, were not adequately remediated. These children make up, we believe, at least one significant portion of the children called "treatment resisters" (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). In the final section of this paper we argue that in addition to a systematic program of phonological based instruction, there should be an equally systematic and comprehensive program that addresses the development of reading fluency and comprehension. But first there must be an articulated definition of what we mean by fluency, for there are vastly different extant perspectives.

The Role of Fluency in Reading Development and Reading Intervention

Although the history of work on reading fluency is long and complex, research on fluency instruction is in its infancy. Further, definitions of fluency differ substantively, with most definitions approaching it as an outcome of accuracy in other processes like decoding. In an excellent recent review of fluency literature, Meyers and Felton (1999) capsule the most consensual view of fluency as "the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly, and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading such as decoding." This approach to fluency accurately captures the last two decades of researchers' views on the end-goal of fluency -- effortless reading with good comprehension (see Carver, 1990; LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985; see however, Torgesen et al., in press).

The problems with such a definition are several, including validation issues. In an effort to aid validation, Torgesen and his colleagues (in press) prefer the minimalist definition of "rate and accuracy in oral reading" (p. 4), used in curriculum-based assessment research (Shinn, Good, Knutson, Tilly & Collins, 1992). Similarly, the National Reading Panel's definition of fluency as "the immediate result of word recognition proficiency" (2000, pp.3-5) permits the simple procedure of testing for proficiency in word recognition, just as Torgesen et al.'s view can be assessed by performance on an oral reading measure that incorporates rate and accuracy (e.g. the Gray Oral Reading Test, Wiederholt, 1992).

Although we concur in principle with these methodological concerns, we believe that there are still thornier issues to confront. In particular, we believe it is essential to consider the multiple underlying dimensions of fluency, like lower-level subskills that are involved in its development. With the exception of Berninger et al. (in press) and Kame'enui, Simmons, Good, and Harn (in press), few current researchers attempt to define fluency either in terms of its component parts or its various levels of reading subskills -- letter, letter pattern, word, sentence, and passage.

Together with Kame'enui et al. (in press), we suggest a figure-ground shift for the conceptualization of fluency: that is, as a developmental process, as well as an outcome. In a broad-ranging paper, Kame'enui and his colleagues conceptualize fluency in a more developmental manner as both the development of "proficiency" in underlying lower-level and component skills of reading (e.g., phoneme awareness), and also as the outcome of proficiency in higher-level processes and component skills (e.g., accuracy in comprehension).

Berninger and her colleagues (in press) take a still broader view, with a systems-approach to fluency. Fluency in this approach is influenced by a) the characteristics of stimulus input (e.g., rate and persistence of a visual signal or speech signal); b) the efficiency and automaticity of internal processes (e.g., the development of phonological, orthographic, and morphological systems); and c) the coordination of responses by the executive functions system. Berninger is one of the few researchers to place special importance on the role of morphological knowledge about words in facilitating the development of orthographic rate and overall fluency.

In an essay on fluency for a special issue on this topic in Scientific Studies of Reading, Tami Katzir-Cohen and Wolf (in press) review the modern history of reading fluency research and use the following developmental definition:

In its beginnings, reading fluency is the product of the initial development of accuracy and the subsequent development of automaticity in underlying sublexical processes, lexical processes, and their integration in single-word reading and connected text. These include perceptual, phonological, orthographic, and morphological processes at the letter-, letter-pattern, and word-level; as well as semantic and syntactic processes at the word-level and connected-text level. After it is fully developed, reading fluency refers to a level of accuracy and rate, where decoding is relatively effortless; where oral reading is smooth and accurate with correct prosody; and where attention can be allocated to comprehension.

Such a developmental, more encompassing view of reading fluency has profound implications for prevention, intervention, and assessment. For, within a developmental perspective, efforts to address fluency must start at the beginning of the reading acquisition process, not after reading is already acquired (as with most current fluency instruction). The importance of working preventatively before difficult fluency problems ever begin is a major theme in the recent studies by Torgesen et al. (in press) and by Kame'enui et al. (in press).

As Stahl recently has described (Stahl, Heubach, & Crammond, 1997), most current efforts in fluency do not work within a prevention framework, but rather are based largely on the Repeated Reading technique (Dahl, 1974; Dowhower, 1994; Samuels, 1985; Young, Bowers, & MacKinnon, 1996). In this approach the already "reading" child is asked to reread a passage at an appropriate level several times until fluent. Repeated reading methods were designed to increase reading rate for the particular materials being used and also for similar materials. Based on a long history of information processing principles (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985), the idea is that comprehension skills can be allocated more time when the rate of decoding is increased. From the developmental context we are working from, such a treatment is an important and efficacious tool when used at a particular phase of fluency development. This type of treatment by itself, however, would be insufficient to address the development of rapid processing in the multiple, sublexical systems, as well as the development of higher-level, semantic (vocabulary) systems.

Over the last five years we have been developing an experimental, developmental approach to fluency instruction. Described in detail in Wolf, Miller, and Donnelly (2000), the program has three key aims for each child: first, accuracy and automaticity in sublexical and lexical levels; second, increased rate in word attack, word identification and comprehension; and third, a transformed attitude towards language. The processes and components described in the research as fluency-related include the following: lower-level attention and visual perception; orthographic (letter-pattern) representation and identification; auditory perception; phonological representation and phoneme awareness; short-term and long-term memory; lexical access and retrieval; semantic representation; decoding and word-identification; morpho-syntactic and prosodic knowledge; and finally, connected-text knowledge and comprehension. In other words, the unavoidable implication of past work on fluency is that reading fluency involves every process and subskill involved in reading. We do not shy away from this conclusion in the RAVE-O program; rather, like Kame'enui and his colleagues (in press), we emphasize that reading fluency involves the development of accuracy and proficiency in every underlying component. Researchers within connectionist approaches (Adams, 1990; Foorman, 1994; Seidenberg & McCelland, 1989) stress the explicit linkages or connections among the orthographic, semantic, and phonological processes; and Berninger et al. (in press) and Adams (1990) add the connections between morphosyntactic knowledge and these other processes.

The RAVE-O program (Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary Enrichment, and Orthography) simultaneously addresses both the need for automaticity in phonological, orthographic, morphosyntactic, and semantic systems and the importance of teaching explicit connections among these three systems. The program emerged as the result of a collaboration by Morris, Lovett, and Wolf to investigate the efficacy of theory-based treatments for different dyslexia subtypes.

The program is taught only in combination with a program that teaches systematic, phonological analysis and blending (see Lovett et al., 2000). Children are taught a group of core words each week that exemplify critical phonological, orthographic, and semantic principles. Each core word is chosen on the basis of: a) shared phonemes with the phonological-treatment program; b) sequenced orthographic patterns; and c) semantic richness (e.g., each core word has at least three different meanings). First, the multiple meanings of core words are introduced in varied semantic contexts. Second, children are taught to connect the phonemes in the core words with the trained orthographic patterns in RAVE-O. For example, children are taught individual phonemes in the phonological program (like "a", "t", and "m") and orthographic chunks with the same phonemes in RAVE-O (e.g., "at" and "am" along with their word families).

There is daily emphasis on practice and rapid recognition of the most frequent orthographic letter patterns in English. Computerized games (see Speed Wizards, Wolf & Goodman, 1996) were designed to allow for maximal practice and to increase the speed of orthographic pattern recognition (i.e., onset and rime) in a fun fashion.

There is a simultaneous emphasis on vocabulary and retrieval, based on earlier work in vocabulary development that suggests that one retrieves fastest what one knows best (see Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; German, 1992; Kame'enui, Dixon, & Carnine, 1987; Wolf & Segal, 1999). Vocabulary growth is conceptualized as essential to both rapid retrieval (in oral and written language) and also to improved comprehension, an ultimate goal in the program. Retrieval skills are taught through a variety of ways including a set of metacognitive strategies called the "Sam Spade Strategies."

Sam Spade also appears as a character in the series of comprehension stories (e.g., Minute Mysteries). These stories accompany each week of RAVE-O and directly address fluency in comprehension in several ways. The controlled vocabulary in the timed and untimed stories both incorporates the week's particular orthographic patterns, and also emphasizes the multiple meanings of the week's core words. The stories provide a superb vehicle for repeated reading practice, which, in turn, helps fluency in connected text. Thus, the Minute Mysteries are multi-purpose vehicles for facilitating fluency in phonological, orthographic, and semantic systems at the same time that they build comprehension skills.

In this way all knowledge systems that were taught explicitly earlier in the week in separate domains are being called upon to work together in order to comprehend a story. In conjunction with the other activities, Minute Mysteries encapsulate our goal to facilitate fluency at every level, and in the process contribute to comprehension skills.

There is an additional system too little discussed by many of us -- that is, the affective-motivational one. The secret weapon of this program is the deceptive cover of whimsy over the program's systematicity. There is a daily emphasis for the teacher and the student on having fun with words: we seek in as many ways as we can daily find to empower children who all too often come to us as "strangers in their own language". (Chukovsky, 1963, p.9).

Conclusion

The leitmotiv of this story - that dyslexia is due to something other than a disorder of reading per se - is underscored by the current status of research in reading disabilities. There are decades of evidence that phonological processes are implicated in many cases of dyslexia, and there is growing consensus that the processes underlying naming speed are independently involved in impeding reading in dyslexic children. A growing number of studies document the strong relationship between early naming speed and later reading fluency. We have sought to use our evolving understanding of the component structure of naming speed to help understand its relationship to reading fluency. Rapid naming, which invokes sensory (e.g., visual, auditory), representational (e.g., orthographic, phonological, morphological), as well as retrieval processes, may fail when any one of these processes or their integration is disrupted. We argue here that reading fluency involves many of these same processes and that a breakdown in any of them can also impede the acquisition of fluent reading. We presented a new definition of fluency that stresses the development of this component structure.

Following this line of theorizing, we also described an experimental, developmental fluency intervention aimed at increasing accuracy and automaticity in the components underlying fluent reading (e.g., the sensory, representational, and retrieval processes), as well as the overt reading skills (e.g., word attack, word recognition, oral reading and comprehension). The RAVE-O program provides, therefore, a comprehensive approach towards fluency's development and a figure-ground shift from most current intervention methods.

The end of this story of naming speed, fluency, and its intervention is not available to anyone; for we are, to be sure, in the very middle of it. It is a story that began improbably but one that has the capacity, we now believe, of illuminating some of the most perplexing reasons why particular children have failed our best past efforts at remediation. An upcoming sequel with data on the RAVE-O program's efficacy for dysfluent readers will further our progress towards this goal.

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