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The basis of the oral motor fluency article by Schepp et al. (2024; this issue) is the process of isolating a single element of a skill and practising it to a fluent level to support the development of the more complex skill it forms part of. This process is well known to and well used by precision teachers (Bulla et al., 2021; Evans et al., 2021; Gist and Bulla, 2022), and the benefits are far reaching; when we practice critical component skills to fluency, more complex skills are able to be acquired and ceiling limitations on performance of that complex skill are reduced (Haughton, 1972).
This is akin to developing strong, sturdy foundations from which to build and develop new skills. While this may conjure up an image of something like a pyramid, with a wide, solid foundation and new skills neatly stacked neatly on top, the beauty is that our skills structure is actually more like an inverted pyramid or a funnel expanding outwards. When we strip back the layers and reduce skills to their basic elements, we see that they are formed from a smaller number of fundamental movements and simple responses. When these responses are strong (i.e. fluent), they can be combined and recombined in countless permutations to form increasingly complex combinations of skills. With this visual analogy, the critical importance of lower-level and base-layer skills becomes even more pronounced; one incomplete (or dysfluent) skill may prevent the emergence of any more complex ones or cause significant instability throughout the structure.
Fluency in a skill or activity is regularly observed as a fundamental proficiency element. Examples are prevalent. For instance, in common leisure activities, fluency might be easily observed in Instagram and TikTok reels of professionals demonstrating football training drills or individuals scaling rock climbing walls with apparent ease, in YouTube performances of silky-smooth musicians or in real life with individuals shuffling and dealing out playing cards for a social game whilst chatting away. Fluency is a flow of accuracy plus speed that allows efficient and effective performances (Binder, 1996). Whilst becoming fluent in the leisure activities described above, save perhaps the friendly card game, may feel way out of reach for those of us who are not already footballers,...