Reading Without Fear

It was the second time in one class that Liam had asked to use the bathroom, and I knew the third time was just around the corner. He seemed to have a sixth sense for when it was going to be his turn to read aloud, and the bathroom always seemed to be his way out.

As a reading interventionist at a private clinic, I had seen this type of behaviour before with some of my other students. It sometimes presented itself in different ways, though. Some students did everything they could to distract the class, including arguing or telling jokes. Some students, like Liam, guzzled water and planned their escape.

Looking back on my years of working with students like this, I realize how easily I used to mistake classroom survival for a bad attitude. What Liam’s parents, other teachers, and I were actually seeing was a child running out of mental fuel every time he opened a book, not a child who didn’t want to learn to read.

When Anxiety Looks Like Avoidance

Striving readers are often described as unmotivated, checked out, or resistant. From one perspective, these labels are understandable. To a teacher, a student’s behaviour can appear to be a disengagement from their classwork. But for many students, what appears to be an attitude problem is actually a neurological one.

Reading is an incredibly complicated task. A good reader is simultaneously decoding words, holding their meanings in their mind, connecting new information to their existing knowledge, and monitoring their own comprehension. Because skilled readers decode words quickly, accurately, and without conscious effort, it frees up their mental resources for the deep and important work of comprehension (Baddeley, 2000).

For striving students who haven’t yet achieved reading automaticity, however, reading is far from effortless. Decoding words requires great effort for them. When a student’s working memory is fully used up on the mechanics of reading, there is nothing left for comprehension, curiosity, or engagement. There’s just no mental room left for comprehension (Sweller, 1994).

Chronic cognitive overload is stressful. When students repeatedly experience reading as something that goes wrong rather than a neutral learning experience, they learn to dread it. Over time, the anticipation of failure becomes its own burden. What teachers see as avoidance or as “bad behaviour” is often a reasonable, self-protective response to a situation that feels tremendously difficult for a striving reader (Katzir et al., 2018; Soriano-Ferrer et al., 2024).

What’s Actually Happening in the Brain

It can be hard for teachers, who are often skilled readers, to put themselves in the shoes of striving readers. I often tell them to think about learning to play hockey. At first, every element of gameplay demands your full attention: skating, balance, rules, teamwork, and following the puck. A lot is happening at the same time. However, those separate actions become coordinated and automatic with enough practice. Hockey players can play the game and hold a conversation or chew gum at the same time because their brains have automated their performance, freeing their mental power for other tasks.

Reading fluency works in a similar way. When a student can recognize words accurately, quickly, and effortlessly, the working memory that was used up by decoding is freed for comprehension. The student can now read and think. They can follow a narrative, make inferences, and ask questions regarding the text (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Stanovich, 1986).

In Canada’s current science of reading conversation, the emphasis has been on phonics and decoding, the essential mechanics of reading instruction. The Canadian Pediatric Society’s recent position statement reinforces this evidence base, recommending systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency-focused practice as the foundations of literacy (Kawamura et al., 2024). What receives less attention is fluency, the bridge between decoding the words and reading with understanding.

Fluency is not the same as reading as fast as possible. It means reading accurately, at a comfortable rate, with natural phrasing and expression, or prosody (Rasinski, 2010). A student who reads a passage of text one syllable at a time, correctly but haltingly, is decoding. A student who reads with fluency is comprehending. For the student, the gap between those two experiences is the difference between striving and ease. When reading becomes easy, it stops being scary.

Fluency Instruction in Action

What does fluency-focused instruction actually look like in practice? How does a reader move from decoding to comprehending? Here are some evidence-based approaches that can be adapted for any classroom and intervention setting.

Repeated oral reading with scaffolded feedback is one of the most well-researched fluency strategies educators use (Rasinski, 2010). Students read the same passage multiple times as deliberate practice, the way musicians rehearse a piece before they perform it. With each reading, a student’s accuracy increases, their reading rate improves, and their effort decreases. The teacher is present throughout to model the target rate and prosody, providing immediate feedback and explicitly tracking the student’s progress. Students need to hear what is improving and what still needs work.

Phrase-cued reading helps students move beyond word-by-word decoding toward natural, meaningful chunks of language. The written text is marked to show where phrases begin and end, helping students process language in units that mirror how we actually speak and understand. This is particularly useful for students whose reading sounds robotic or choppy, even when their accuracy is solid. This is a sign that decoding still requires enough mental effort to disrupt prosody. Again, the aim is to move beyond decoding to comprehension, to real fluency.

Structured progression through decodable and authentic texts makes sure that students practise fluency at a level where success is within reach. A student working on vowel teams should not be building fluency in a passage full of multisyllabic words they cannot yet decode reliably. Fitting the text aligned to the student’s current phonics knowledge means that practice produces automaticity rather than reinforcing effortful struggle.

“He Volunteered to Read!”

The shift that happens when a struggling reader develops fluency is hard to miss and is one of the biggest teaching rewards! Teachers tend to notice it even before the assessment data shows it. It is more than a change in the data; it is a change in attitude.

We often first see a change in body language: students sit differently, with confidence. They start looking up, not afraid to make eye contact with the teacher or their classmates. They are no longer looking for a chance to use the bathroom before it is their turn to read. A classroom teacher whose student completed our intervention described it this way: “I knew something had changed when he started volunteering to read first during class. He’d never done that before! He just showed up differently.”

When reading stops being scary, school becomes less scary, too. The chronic worry that shadows striving readers and follows them into every classroom begins to lift. Students start to see themselves differently, not as people who are “bad at reading,” but as people who are learning to read and succeeding. The identity shift is slow but real, and it is deeply connected to cognitive processes (Vieira et al., 2024).

Liam, the boy who escaped my classroom by whatever means necessary, completed an intensive reading intervention and returned to his classroom a confident reader. His teacher emailed to say that Liam had volunteered to read a passage aloud to the class for the very first time! “He was so nervous,” the teacher wrote. “But he did it.” That is what we are working toward: fluent reading, comprehension, and confidence.

Building Programs That Solve Both Problems at Once

The conclusions of this type of research extend beyond individual students and single classrooms. Schools designing reading intervention programs should understand that fluency is a core component of structured literacy and should be treated as such.

Teacher training programs should go beyond phonics instruction to encompass explicit preparation for fluency practice. Recent Canadian research suggests that teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy concepts predicts the quality of their instruction, and that differentiation matters most in classrooms in which students arrive behind (Parrila et al., 2024). Intervention programs should track not just decoding accuracy and comprehension scores, but also other indicators such as student engagement, reading self-concept, and anxiety around reading tasks. They are crucial to academic outcomes. They are also a measure of success beyond what typical scores might indicate.

It also means reconsidering how we talk about reading difficulties with students and families. Students whose reading anxiety is rooted in cognitive overload are not students with motivation problems. They are often students whose brains have been working very hard, for a very long time, under very difficult conditions. They deserve instruction that addresses the actual source of the problem, and the patience and optimism that come from understanding what is really happening and what help is actually required.

Academic success and student emotional health are not competing priorities. In the case of reading fluency, they are treated by the same intervention.

Reflection Questions

1. Do you have a student in your class who seems disengaged or avoidant during reading tasks? What do you think their behaviour might be telling you about their experience of reading, and how might that change how you respond?
2. How does your current reading program or curriculum address fluency, alongside phonics and decoding? Where are the gaps? How might they be addressed?
3. What would it look like in your school to track both academic progress and emotional engagement for students receiving reading intervention?
4. How are teachers in your setting supported to deliver reading fluency instruction? What additional professional learning would help?

References

Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(11), 417–423.

Katzir, T., Kim, Y. S. G., & Dotan, S. (2018). Reading self-concept and reading anxiety in second grade children: The roles of word reading, emergent literacy skills, working memory and gender. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1180.

Kawamura, A., Orsino, A., McLeod, S., Handley-Derry, M., Siegel, L., Vine, J., & Jones-Stokreef, N. (2024). Literacy in school-aged children: A paediatric approach to advocacy and assessment. Paediatrics & Child Health, 29(8), 531–536.

LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6(2), 293–323.

Parrila, R., Inoue, T., Dunn, K., Savage, R., & Georgiou, G. (2024). Connecting teachers’ language knowledge, perceived ability and instructional practices to Grade 1 students’ literacy outcomes. Reading and Writing, 37(5), 1153–1181.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010). The fluent reader: Oral and silent reading strategies for building fluency, word recognition, and comprehension (2nd ed.). Scholastic.

Soriano-Ferrer, M., Morte-Soriano, M. R., Begeny, J., & Piedra-Martínez, E. (2024). Reading self-concept, trait emotional intelligence and anxiety of primary school children with dyslexia. Frontiers in Education, 9, 1371627.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360–407.

Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and Instruction, 4(4), 295–312.

Vieira, A. P. A., Peng, P., Antoniuk, A., DeVries, J., Rothou, K., Parrila, R., & Georgiou, G. (2024). Internalizing problems in individuals with reading, mathematics and unspecified learning difficulties: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of Dyslexia, 74(1), 4–26.

Meet the Expert(s)

Melinda Cameron

Director of Clinics and Research

Melinda Cameron is director of clinics and research at the Halifax Learning Centre, a Nova Scotia–based structured literacy organization that has supported thousands of students through its evidence-based programs. She holds a Research Master of Arts in Literacy Education from Mount Saint Vincent University and brings two decades of experience in literacy instruction, with particular expertise in phonological awareness, fluency, and automaticity. A regular presenter at education conferences, she works at the intersection of reading science and classroom practice.

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