POSSuM: The Multi-Component Approach to Teaching Fluency

In the second half of our great two-episode conversation with Dr. Melissa Orkin and Sarah Gannon, we continued our discussion about empowering teachers to support all learners, particularly older students and those with double deficit dyslexia. 

One important tool Dr. Orkin shared is the POSSuM framework, which was featured in the article “The More You Know: How Teaching Multiple Aspects of Word Knowledge Builds Fluency Skills,” authored by Orkin, Kirk Vanacore, Laura Rhinehart, Rebecca Gotlieb, and Maryanne Wolf (The Reading League Journal, May/June 2022). 

The POSSuM framework is an acronym that captures a multi-component view of fluency. As the article explains: “improving reading fluency is not a matter of practicing until reading becomes automatic or about guided re-reading, but rather increasing the rapid access and integration of students’ breadth and depth of word knowledge and connecting linguistic knowledge with their automatic decoding processes.”

POSSuM, or the Five Aspects of Word Knowledge, helps us map out the parts of the multi-component approach to teaching fluency: 

Phonology: The rules that govern the sound structure of a language.

Contribution to Fluent Reading: Familiarity with the sound structure of language facilitates reading and supports skills such as sound discrimination, segmenting, and blending, critical contributors to accurate decoding, which is required for fluent reading.

Orthography: The rules that govern letter patterns and the ways in which they are combined in a language.

Contribution to Fluent Reading: Familiarity with the orthographic structure of a language supports automaticity with reading words, which leads to fluent reading.

Semantics: The size of a vocabulary; the breadth and depth of students’ vocabulary skills.

Contribution to Fluent Reading: The more students know about a word (e.g., the multiple meanings of a word), the greater their automaticity when retrieving its meanings and roles in text.

Syntax: The ways words function within sentences and contexts (e.g., noun, verb, adjective).

Contribution to Fluent Reading: Knowledge of parts of speech supports the automatic retrieval of words as students read and correlates strongly with their reading fluency and comprehension.

Morphology:  The system for organizing and understanding the varied uses of the smallest units of meaning (morphemes).

Contribution to Fluent Reading: Morphology highlights both semantic and syntactic information and also makes long words more accessible for struggling readers.

For more on POSSuM, you can read the full article here and find additional information on the Crafting Minds Group website.