Fluency
Build oral reading fluency to improve overall comprehension and reading enjoyment with a variety of resources.
Why build students' fluency skills?
- Practice accuracy: Ensure students read words correctly by decoding them using their phonics and word study skills. Break bad habits such as guessing, skipping, or replacing words.
- Focus on automaticity: Help students read effortlessly by recognizing sight words, which are often previously learned high-frequency words.
- Read at an appropriate rate: Encourage students to read at a pace that optimizes comprehension, avoiding speeds that are too fast or too slow.
- Read with prosody: Emphasize expression, including intonation and phrasing, to enhance reading fluency.
- Incorporate all four elements of fluency: Bridge fluency and reading comprehension through reading with accuracy, automaticity, appropriate rate, and prosody.
Often teachers and students mistakenly focus only on accuracy and rate, equating fluency with reading a target number of words per minute. Fluency is so much more than words per minute.
How can fluency resources supplement your instruction?
- Model all four elements of fluency: Choose from a variety of Learning A-Z texts to model reading accuracy, rate, automaticity, and prosody.
- Incorporate repeated readings: Use short-form texts, songs, rhymes, and plays; read each text multiple times.
- Assign audio versions of texts: Incorporate technology to model fluent reading.
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Use the resources flexibly: Determine the best way to supplement your fluency instruction in small-group or whole-group settings:
- Follow the lessons in sequential order to move from simple to more complex skills. OR
- Choose lessons and resources that match your core program's scope and sequence.
Important Terms
- Accuracy: The ability to read words correctly without errors.
- Automaticity: The ability to read a word automatically, without needing to decode it, because the word is recognized or remembered.
- Rate: The speed at which a student reads.
- Prosody: An aspect of fluent reading that involves expression, including intonation and phrasing.
Fluent readers decode words quickly and smoothly, so they can focus on comprehension and make meaning from the text. Learning A–Z texts include opportunities for:
- Oral reading practice
- Repeated readings
- Reader's theater