Many students face obstacles when developing reading fluency. Once they’ve mastered phonics rules and spelling patterns, they often become stuck. They have been in the habit of reading single words at a time, and habits are hard to break. They are able to read longer sentences, but they do so in a way that is disjointed and almost robotic, focusing on one word at a time, instead of thinking about how the words should sound in relation to one another. This skill is also known as expressiveness, and it’s an important component of reading fluency.
When it comes to developing reading fluency, quantity matters. A child will have more success tackling small amounts of text at a time, than if they have to read a long passage all at once. Breaking up pages, paragraphs, and even sentences into meaningful phrases can help students strengthen their reading fluency. This strategy is called chunking.
A quick clarification: the term “chunking” sometimes refers to a decoding strategy. This is where students “chunk“ words into smaller, more manageable pieces, in order to tackle the sounds more successfully. After chunking in this way, students then blend the individual pieces together to solve the entire word. While also an effective strategy to build decoding skills, this type of chunking does not address reading fluency.
Memory Retention
Incorporating the principals of chunking into more general study habits is effective for memory retention. For example, the reason we are able to remember long phone numbers, and eventually memorize them, is because they appear in groups. If phone numbers were presented as long, uninterrupted strings of numbers, it would take us much longer to learn them. The same logic applies to reading text! When students read smaller sections at a time, they are able to retain more of what they read.
The Purposes of Chunking
Chunking can be applied to reading with two purposes: one is to strengthen students’ comprehension by giving them shorter passages of text to read. In between sections, they pause to reflect on what they’ve read through some sort of comprehension question or task. A large-scale and commonly used example of this is dividing assignments for a chapter book into chapters. Students write, think, and/or discuss questions about what they’ve read in between chapters. Breaking it down even further, and having students pause periodically within those chapters, can help students comprehend even more deeply. They are less likely to be able to think critically about a text when they read longer sections all at once.
The second purpose of chunking is to help students think about sentence structure and phrasing more meaningfully. A teacher can mark up a short passage for the students to read out loud, indicating where the individual chunks are. Here’s an example of what this might look like:
The heavy snow / fell from the sky / like a giant blanket / slowly lowering itself onto the earth.
The slash marks in this sentence indicate where a child might pause briefly in the text. For students who struggle specifically with expressiveness in general, this strategy is especially effective because it draws students’ attention to the natural phrasing of a sentence.
Chunking is a strategy teachers should provide lots of guidance with at first. However, students should eventually learn how to use the strategy independently. Being able to understand and apply the technique to any task, topic, or subject area can only help students learn more deeply and more meaningfully.
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