Richard is in 7th grade and has been receiving reading intervention since the 4th grade. He has had explicit instruction in foundational skills and has developed fairly strong decoding abilities. However, Richard still struggles with reading fluently. He finds multisyllabic words challenging and has stopped trying to decode them. His intervention goals focus on both fluency and reading comprehension, but he is making little progress.

Richard’s frustration is evident. He exhibits low confidence and self-esteem and is now hesitant to engage in reading activities— even during one-on-one teacher time.  He says he does not like reading and doesn’t think it is important because he can get information from other sources. He is disengaging from other academic areas, school in general, and from his peers.

Does Richard sound familiar? Many educators across the country are experiencing this same challenge: students who receive science of reading interventions but still struggle to achieve fluency and comprehension.

When Decoding Isn’t Enough

The science of reading has revolutionized how we approach literacy instruction, emphasizing the importance of explicit, systematic teaching of foundational skills. For many students, this approach works wonderfully. But for others—particularly those in Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions—something critical is missing.

Here’s what’s happening: Students like Richard develop adequate or near-adequate decoding skills but never reach automatic word recognition—an essential component of fluency. They seem to make benchmarks for early skills and then get stuck. The gap between decoding ability and fluent reading creates a bottleneck that impedes comprehension and academic progress.

Let’s break down Richard’s reading competencies:

• Decoding and accuracy: Functional but inconsistent
• Retention and generalization: Limited ability to apply decoding skills to new words and contexts
• Automatic word recognition: Significantly below grade level
• Transfer to connected text: Poor application of skills when reading continuous text

These reading challenges manifest in concerning behaviors:

• Poor engagement during reading instruction
• Lack of motivation
• Avoidance of independent reading
• Disengagement from academics
• Low self-esteem as a learner and reader

The Right Practice at the Right Time

First, we must create the conditions to support engagement, motivation, and learning.  It is imperative to change Richard’s progress as quickly and successfully as possible. To start, he must engage in the work and experience success.

It is key for each student to experience the right practice at the right time. The learner should know where they are in the journey—what they’ve accomplished and what they need to do to achieve success. This awareness is critical for engagement and motivation.

The way in which skills are learned and practiced impacts how they are retained and generalized to new contexts and whether they become automatic, all essential to becoming fluent. Giving Richard a way to visualize where he is on the fluency journey is critically important to get his buy-in. He needs to know that:

• He can be successful in learning to read words quickly and easily, like his peers
• It is not his fault that he has not made progress
•  What he needs to practice can be provided.  

The success he achieves will promote self-confidence and motivation to continue. But this isn’t just about encouragement—it’s about providing practice based on learning principles known to target the development of automaticity and fluency.

Variation: The Missing Element in Reading Practice

A crucial learning principle often overlooked in reading interventions is variation—an important learning principle that activates long-term memory—increasing retention, retrieval, and automaticity.

For Richard, it is time to shift from acquiring foundational reading skills through explicit, sequential, direct instruction to systematic practice in which he must use his skills across tasks and with new content.  This systematic, structured practice pushes the learner to do the work, which helps “make learning stick.”  

Types of Variations That Drive Fluency

1. Mixing up tasks. When students like Richard practice varied tasks rather than the same task repeatedly, they develop flexibility and perspective. Instead of drilling the same phonics patterns in isolation, varying between decoding, encoding, chunking, and application to connected text creates deeper neural pathways.

2. Changing content within tasks. Introducing different types of content within a task highlights contrasts and supports generalization. It is important to expose Richard to a variety of multisyllabic words from multiple sources and contexts (eg science, narratives, everyday words).  

3. Adjusting difficulty levels. Creating “desirable difficulties” by gradually increasing challenge supports generalization and retrieval. The challenge pushes Richard to recognize and discriminate similarities and differences with words he knows (both in word structure and meaning). This effort helps him retain information in long-term memory.

These variations don’t just improve decoding—they specifically support the development of automaticity. By requiring Richard to repeatedly retrieve and apply his knowledge in varied contexts, the brain pathways for word recognition become stronger and faster.

Moving Beyond Skill Acquisition to Skill Integration

What’s often missing in science of reading interventions for students like Richard is not the explicit instruction of foundational skills, but rather the structured practice needed to integrate those skills until they become automatic.

This is where cognitive science complements the science of reading. While the science of reading tells us what to teach, cognitive science shows us how to ensure that learning sticks and transfers to authentic reading contexts.

For Richard and students like him, we need to create practice opportunities that:

• Incorporate meaningful variation
• Provide appropriate challenge
• Offer immediate feedback
• Connect to authentic reading experiences
• Build confidence through visible progress

Practical Next Steps

If you’re working with students like Richard, consider these approaches:

• Analyze whether your struggling readers have adequate decoding skills but lack automaticity.
• Introduce varied practice formats rather than repetitive drills.
• Convey to students that it is like moving from individual skills development in sports to playing with fluency. They begin to see what is missing and buy into the practice.
• Incorporate “desirable difficulties” that stretch students without overwhelming them.
• Celebrate improvements when students become automatic in speed and accuracy, even before grade-level benchmarks are reached.

Remember that these learning principles support not just word recognition but also knowledge acquisition, oral and written comprehension, and inferential processing. By bringing together the science of reading and the science of learning, we can help students like Richard bridge the gap between decoding and fluent reading.

In our next blog, we’ll explore additional learning principles, including interleaving and cumulative review, that support the development of reading fluency.What challenges are you seeing with your Tier 2 and Tier 3 students? Are you noticing gaps between decoding ability and fluent reading? Send me a note at Carolyn@WordFlight.com