What children who struggle with reading fluency want you to know.

Based on 25 years of working with children who are not reading with fluency or reading for pleasure, I know that they are frustrated and want honest answers that will explain the disconnect they experience when reading. These are the questions that they would love to ask.

What is the point of reading if it feels so effortful?

Why are you asking me to read when reading is just pointless?

By the age of 8 children realise that their experience of reading is not rewarding. They begin to compare themselves to others in their class and see themselves as different. They know that they do not relate to a text in the same way as their friends. This is a part of the problem, but beneath the surface there is another difference. Their experience of rhythm is also different.

It was more than 25 years ago when teachers at a primary school in Hertfordshire asked me to work with a group of upper key stage two children, who were often excluded and were years behind age expectation. The usual ways of teaching had not worked in school and I soon discovered that my own teaching was not working either. It was only when they told me that they loved football, that I imagined I might have a chance of achieving something if I worked with their feet. It turned out that rhythm-based movement was key to unlocking their learning. This turned into a pattern when I tried the same approach with other children who did not learn in the conventional way.

As we can see from observing these children, they know their letters and sounds, they interact well with their peers, they can listen intently in class and follow a story, when their teacher reads to the class. They are, however, using different mechanisms and professional noticing attests to this.

These children watch facial expression and listen to the timbres in voices with exquisite attention to detail. When they don’t follow the gist, they may mask their confusion with smiles or create diversions or animate the energy in the room in their own way. They are sensitive to social cues and build strong bonds with others through humour, affection and helpfulness.

These coping strategies may manifest in a different form for neurodivergent children who may be experiencing emotional and sensory sensitivity in addition to language processing challenges.

Even though we’ve had decades of research and initiatives, we’ve missed this important key element in our understanding of reading development. If language processing is weak, additional cues are required.

You might be wondering why this pattern exists and why rhythm might be involved in teaching and learning. Even after all these years, did reading experts overlook a vital missing link in the teaching of reading?

Why phonics alone doesn't build reading fluency

Many schools focus heavily on phonics in early years and key stage one, but fluency gets less structured attention.

Since The Rose Review in 2006, an emphasis on teaching phonemes, the smallest sounds of language, has transformed early reading instruction. After at least fifteen years of explicit ‘phonics’ teaching, we might expect more children and young people to be reading with confidence and enjoyment. Many are not.

Although reading for pleasure is associated with reading fluency, the link is not causal. Children who read fluently enjoy reading, but reading with enjoyment does not amount to fluency. A wave of Reading for Pleasure is moving through schools and seems to involve everyone in a well-intended gesture towards equality and inclusion. But should schools expect children to read for pleasure when they do not even derive meaning from print?

Fluent versus non-fluent readers: A key distinction

Fluent readers know that reading is a powerful skill that they can deploy to unlock strange and mysterious texts, whether fiction or non-fiction. A non-fluent reader will feel the same degree of curiosity, but use their powers of guessing, inferring and interpreting contextual cues to translate images, graphics and illustrations into a meaningful narrative. We can manipulate the ‘Reading for Pleasure’ slogan to involve everyone, by widening our definitions of reading, but this would not narrow the gap.

Let’s acknowledge that if these children interact by using contextual cues to supplement their language processing, it follows that they would also need explicit support for the development of their reading fluency. If we expect their reading skills to ‘bootstrap’ onto a weak language processing system, we have set them up to fail. This is the structural ‘gap’ in the system. Making reading ‘fun’ will not only trivialise the issue but also aggravate the problem.

The Overlooked Link: How rhythm supports reading fluency

Rhythm underpins the mechanisms of the brain, including language processing and reading fluency.

Researchers have even established that a ‘neural overlap’ exists between phonemic awareness and rhythmic awareness. There are two possible explanations for this overlap – one is that both phonemes and rhythm are processed in the same way, or that inhibitory control is shared by mechanisms that activate both phonemic and rhythmic awareness.

Incomplete sound repertoires and phonemic gaps

During the sensitive time period of language acquisition in the first five years of a child’s development, it is possible that phonemes that are not perceived clearly enough during this period are not available to the child subsequently. If a child has an incomplete repertoire of sounds, they will rely more on contextual cues and may conflate similar sounding phonemes throughout life unless they learn about the ‘missing sounds’ through specific techniques.

The double disadvantage: Weak phonemes and weak rhythm

A child with gaps in phonemic awareness is likely to have weak sensitivity to rhythm and to experience a double disadvantage. If the smallest sounds of language were not comprehensively laid down in infancy, access to automaticity which underpins fluent reading will be incomplete. The good news is that a child’s sensitivity to rhythm is not limited by a developmental time window, as rhythms play an adaptive role in our response to situations in everyday life – from the way we walk, run and chew food, to the way we communicate with each other. A body of evidence has accumulated since Hebb, showing that the timing of neurons matters: ‘cells that fire together, wire together’ and well-controlled studies of musical training (which involve precision in terms of timing) have been shown to support phonological discrimination.

Reading as Movement: Why timing matters for fluency

Timing and rhythm are essential for learning new skills involving movement and coordination such as riding a bicycle, driving a car or typing. Reading too can be taught in the same way. Eye movements across the line of text on the page require coordination. Just as we assimilate the flow of scenery as we ride, run or drive forwards, our eyes are anticipating what is coming up next in our reading.

The Meta Level: Rhythmic cues in syntax and morphology

Many years ago teachers would speak of students who were reading ‘word-by-word’ or ‘barking at print’. Although this type of language has fallen out of use, the problem remains. When reading does not flow, each syllable protrudes in the same abrupt way that it always did. The natural shading and shaping that we identify in fluent reading as sounding natural and more like speech is missing.

The more subtle qualities of fluent reading are not well-understood, partly because we have for too long been focused on social disadvantage, cultural sensitivity and phonemes. However, if we now identify the ‘meta’ level of reading, (syntax and morphology and the subtle rhythmic cues within them) we may at last narrow the gaps that, left unaddressed, widen over time.

We do not need to teach any of these ‘meta’ cues explicitly because they are already part of the language processing system and vary between communities. So, what are the practical action steps that do make a difference?

Rhythm-based reading intervention: What it looks like in practice

Target those who are not reading fluently in line with expectation and children who can decode but do not read with understanding. All new skills develop through repetition and practise, and this is rhythm-based learning in action. When a child has phonemic gaps in their natural language processing system, a rhythm-based approach supplements and complements traditional phonics-based teaching.

A rhythm-based intervention requires an inclusive response and sensitivity on the part of everyone involved if we are to strengthen responses at the millisecond level. This is delicate and dedicated work that can transform children’s reading after only a few short sessions, in which teachers build children’s sensitivity to rhythm, syntax and meaning through movement control, rhythmic precision and reading.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. Imagine for a moment the children for whom teachers have most concern, reading simple musical notation and moving in time to background music. The music is age-appropriate, specially commissioned and written to my research-based brief. Their focus as the children put it: “Has never been so concentrated”.

The transition from decoding to fluency is smooth in children who process phoneme-grapheme correspondence by ‘bootstrapping’ (see section 2) print onto a strong language processing system that became well-defined in infancy. For children, for whom there are gaps or weak definition of phonemic awareness, rhythm-based learning is the bridge between language processing, fluency and comprehension. You might be wondering to what extent a rhythm-based programme could work?

Evidence: How rhythm-based learning improves reading comprehension

The significant effect of rhythm-based exercises on reading comprehension and fluency is robust in lower attaining readers, with statistically significant findings that have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Among lower attaining readers with gaps that unaddressed widen over time, rhythm-based intervention enables children to catch-up with others, to enjoy reading and to see themselves as readers. This is exactly what happened to the group of children who inspired this approach more than 25 years ago. In terms of gains in reading comprehension age, (using NARA2) there are three levels of progress: large (at least 24 months), medium (12-23 months) and small (1-11 months). Large gains are seen in children with a reading accuracy age of eight years or higher. Small gains are seen in children with a baseline reading accuracy age between six and seven years, but there are also significant gains in phonological blending when phonemic awareness at baseline is weak. These gains happen after only ten weekly sessions of ten minutes.

A note on the research landscape: although we cannot peer into the brains of our students and figure out what works and what does not, we can infer from observation and evidence-based approaches how to address widening gaps in attainment.

When teachers speak about mixed findings in the broader ‘power of music’ literature, they are correct. Researchers often define child participants by age, but no other parameter. If they are already sensitive to phonemes and rhythm and reading well, they do not make gains in reading during an intervention. I established this distinction early in my own research. If a study does not specify the type of musical training that children receive, and many do not, then these methodological factors also contribute to the mixed picture, and they underscore the importance of targeted, precise evidence-based implementation.

Take the Next Step

If you are thinking about the children in your school right now, you are welcome to download the free PDF about the neural overlap between rhythmic and phonemic awareness, which explains how rhythm scaffolds the important step between decoding and fluent reading.

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