Accuracy is necessary but insufficient. Speed, even when accurate, is also insufficient. And when children are taught to read accurately (and at pace) reading fluency remains incomplete. Learners are often taught to add a performative layer of expression to their reading, as if fluency could be achieved through mimicry. Yet fluent reading does not arise from expression, it arises from temporal anticipation: the predictive alignment of decoding and comprehension within time.

Fluency is often described as the bridge between decoding and comprehension, yet this description conceals more than it reveals. Fluency achieved through rehearsal can mask a lack of coherence and understanding. Automaticity, the automatic processing of print is frequently cited as the mechanism that frees cognitive resources for comprehension and fluency, but this explanation alone cannot account for varying reading outcomes.

When instructional practices are shaped by plausible but underpowered interpretations of research, the cost is not only felt as inefficiency, but also as a loss of trust between pupils and teachers. Reading is social before to becomes motivational, and this social dimension is central how fluency and comprehension develop.

Fluency, then, cannot be reduced to the visible and audible elements of reading as performance. What matters is the underlying mechanism that generates those outcomes. When fluency is treated as an observable behaviour rather than a process unfolding in real time, instruction might target outcomes rather than adjust the conditions that precede them.

The distinction between outcomes and mechanisms is structural and it determines whether teaching supports coherence in reading fluency, or merely rehearses its appearance.

1. Accuracy and Speed Are Outcomes, Not Mechanisms

There is no single account in neuroscience that demonstrates exactly which mechanisms underpin the development of reading comprehension for all learners. Gough and Tumner’s A Simple View of Reading (SVR) offers a clear and reasonable way to understand why the social aspect of reading comprehension matters.

According to this framework, reading comprehension is only available to those who can decode with ease and also have good levels of language comprehension. Of course, children start school with varying levels of language comprehension. We know that they are given at least adequate instruction in decoding and the majority of pupils can decode print. The remaining element accounts for the intersection between decoding and language comprehension. This is represented in the SVR equation by the ‘X’ symbol at the heart of reading development:

Reading Comprehension = Decoding x Language Comprehension.

Much of what is described as reading fluency in classrooms is, in fact, the observation of outcomes rather than the identification of mechanisms. Teachers often see accuracy, pace, and expression, and infer fluency. Yet these are the products of fluency, not its source.

The Problem with Treating Fluency as Performance

Performative reading, where children reproduce expressive cues without temporal anticipation, can look and sound fluent, but lacks the deeper coherence that binds decoding and comprehension in time. Instruction that focuses on cultivating reading as performance risks reinforcing imitation rather than developing the mechanism that generates real fluency.

This lies in the reader’s capacity to anticipate and to align decoding and comprehension within time. Without this coherence, the visible and audible elements of fluency remain superficial, however polished the performance may appear.

Fluent reading is said to support the development of reading comprehension, and yet comprehension does not necessarily land. Children look and sound as if they can read, and read fluently, but they are not enjoying the process and engagement remains dutiful.

2. Fluency as temporal coherence

Following rhythm-based intervention, we see the perception of language and communication, whether uttered or printed, cohering in real time, both in conversation and when reading aloud. Teachers find the change unusual and have recorded children who are suddenly reading with expression, engagement, understanding and prosody - even though their automaticity was still unreliable. So, how can we reframe reading as orientated in time?

According to Marie Reiss Jones, author of Time: Our Lost Dimension, there are two modes of attending: (i) rhythmic attending (which is future-oriented) and (ii) analytic attending, which examines the details of the task. This may seem a little abstract at first, so let’s imagine for a moment that we are visiting an art gallery.

Most people step back to appreciate a painting from a distance, and then approach it close-up, peering at the brush strokes, the textures, the techniques and other fine details that make up the work. It’s not possible to engage with the ‘bigger picture’ when examining the details, so they then tend to step back again to view the piece as a whole.

Reading with fluency feels distinct from simply decoding, because the details are no longer the priority, though they are integrated within the coherence of the reading and the meaning of the words. Attention is directed not to individual syllables, but to the way they flow as meaningful sequences, each one leading into the next. Rhythm is the missing dimension that allows this to happen. Rhythm is not a therapy, but it is the signal that helps people switch flexibly between analytic and future oriented states in social activities, which of course include learning and reading.

3. Prediction, rhythm and the construction of meaning

When children have learned to decode, but their reading has no meaning or flow, they do imagine that something important is missing and this a disturbing thought for a child. The symbols are recalled but there’s no meaning associated with them. Reading is more like a word search than a narrative. Why is this? What’s missing?

Cognitive loading in symbol recognition can feel so heavy that working memory becomes entirely absorbed by the task of decoding, keeping reading locked in the analysis of each tiny phoneme and the combination of graphemes, that make up a single syllable.

The visual recognition of the word apple and the sound of the word read by the child, do not connect with the taste, shape, textures, colors of the fruit in the child’s internal working model of an apple. This is why there is an ongoing and profound sense of futility and incompleteness when reading is not fluent or meaningful.

On the other hand, when reading fluency involves coherence and a nuanced feeling of forward direction, the flow becomes self-sustaining because each contextual cue matches the printed word with the information flowing from the children’s internal working model, constructing sequences of meaning that are future-oriented in time.

Recently a delighted child described the change in his reading:

It’s amazing! It’s like a movie playing in your mind. You can see everything that’s happening.

4. Prosody as temporal structure, not performance

Prosody is structured in time and each intonation unit coincides with the slow delta oscillation frequencies within the brain. Imagine these rolling like waves with the rhythm of the language. The cyclic quality of this movement is predictive and each unit of information generates the potential for the next one to arise. Prosody is unmistakable in terms of its sing-song quality, importantly the up at the end of a question and the down at the end of a sentence and the moment when each sentence feels well-defined as a unit of meaning.

5. Implications for teaching and learning environments

When fluency is treated as performative, the social and rhythmic conditions that enable it are often overlooked. Fluency develops most powerfully within enriched learning environments where reading is shared, rhythmic and socially meaningful. Performative reading can be taught, but coherent fluent reading must be grown. It arises through participation in contexts where rhythm, dialogue and anticipation are naturally embedded in the act of reading. Here, children internalize the temporal patterns of language through interaction, not imitation.

The teacher’s role, therefore, is not to model expression for replication, but to cultivate conditions where rhythm and meaning are experienced collectively.

If we think about reading as a social encounter - then amid the long periods of flowing reading, there are moments when we might peer into the text to check a detail, or when we want to double check a word if something didn’t sound quite right. This happens in a similar way in conversations. We would only do this if we really needed to. It is more enjoyable to flow with a book or a friendly conversation than to stop and pick out a detail. This takes effort and the greater risk is that we might not find the same level of engaged interaction if we break our of our rhythm. What this tells us is that reading well and being engaged in a great conversation are similarly social, which means that we are locked into the interaction. We are actually entrained which means that we are synchronized by the flow of the written language, in a similar way that we lock rhythmically into a conversation with a close friend.

Why Fluency Emerges When Coherence Is Supported

Taken together, I would recommend that we do not overload children by asking them to mark words for emphasis, places to pause and places to observe punctuation. All of these cues dilute the natural development of reading fluency by adding an unnecessary layer to the cognitive load. When children are enriched sufficiently by rhythm to switch into a different mental state, they read with expression, prosody and fluency. Best of all, they enjoy their reading and teachers tell me that the children ‘see themselves as readers’.

Fluency, then, is sustained not by performance, but by coherence, both cognitive and social. When reading occurs within enriched environments that value rhythm, reciprocity, and shared attention, these cultural signals become the means through which anticipation can develop. Targeted readers learn to rely on predictive cues in language and this is why fluency cannot be imposed. In supportive contexts, fluency emerges through reciprocity, reflecting a deeper, rhythmically sensitive and more coherent relationship between the reader, the text and the school community.

REFERENCES

Gough P. B., Tunmer W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10.

Jones, Mari R. "Time, our lost dimension: toward a new theory of perception, attention, and memory." Psychological review 83.5 (1976): 323.