Fluency

Fluency

What does a good reader sound like?

Good reading requires more than just decoding words correctly. Think about the best audiobook you have ever listened to. Chances are, the way the book was read aloud had an impact on your enjoyment and understanding of the text.

What qualities made the reader effective? Maybe it was the way the sentences flowed smoothly from one to the next, or the way the reader’s tone matched the excitement of the story. These are characteristics of reading fluency, one of the five pillars of early literacy.

In this video, we will describe the components of reading fluency, explain how fluency is connected to the other pillars of early literacy, and share instructional practices to help readers improve their fluency skills.

Fluency: A Pillar of Early Literacy

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five areas, or pillars, key to the development of early literacy skills.[i] These pillars are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These components work together to foster strong reading skills, and gaps in one area may affect the others.

Fluency consists of three main components: speed, accuracy, and prosody. Speed refers to how quickly a text is read. The text should be read quickly enough for the reader to make connections between words and sentences and understand the overall meaning. However, if a text is read TOO quickly, comprehension can also be affected. The number of words per minute a student is expected to read varies by age.

Accuracy refers to reading words correctly. Fluent readers automatically recognize most words in a text, and they have a range of strategies they can quickly use to understand the few words they don’t know. They do not have to stop often to figure out new words.

Prosody refers to rhythm, phrasing, and tone while reading. In other words, reading should sound like natural conversation. There should be pauses after commas and between sentences. Statements, questions, and exclamations should sound different from one another, and the reader’s voice should contain expression.Think about how you might read a cliffhanger sentence at the end of a chapter in a mystery. How might that differ from the way you would read the punchline of a joke in a comedy?

Reading with the appropriate speed, accuracy, and prosody assists readers with other areas of reading development, including comprehension. Fluent readers are able to focus on the overall meaning of the text; they are not overwhelmed with decoding individual words.

Instructional Practices to Improve Fluency

What can you do if you observe students struggling with fluency? First, identify the specific areas of fluency — speed, accuracy, or prosody — that need improvement. Next, implement instructional practices that target those areas.

Let’s explore some of those instructional practices now.

Sight Word Practice

Students who do not automatically recognize a large number of sight words can benefit from additional practice in this area. These words are commonly found throughout most texts, and they cannot easily be sounded out. Recognizing these sight words instantly will increase reading fluency. Activities like sight word scavenger hunts and building sight words with letter tiles assist in developing recognition of these common words.

Teaching Decoding Strategies

Teaching a variety of decoding strategies also helps build fluency. Strategies like looking for known word parts, using context clues, and using picture clues can help students figure out unknown words. Since not all strategies work on all words, readers benefit from having multiple known strategies in their arsenals to apply as needed.

Rereading

Another strategy to build fluency is rereading the same text repeatedly. When students read a new text for the first time, they use energy to decode new words. After reading the text a time or two, they begin recognizing the words from the previous reading. As the words flow more quickly during these repeated readings, students can focus more on expression, paying attention to punctuation marks, and other aspects of fluency.

Modeled Reading

Modeled reading occurs when a teacher reads a passage aloud first before asking students to read it independently. Students benefit from hearing the words first before having to decode them, and they model their speed and prosody after the teacher.

Shared Reading

Shared reading occurs when the teacher and students read a text aloud together at the same time. Again, students model their speed and prosody after the teacher’s example.

Review

Now, let’s review what we’ve learned about fluency.

Fluency is one of the five pillars of early literacy, along with phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension. These five pillars work together to form strong reading skills, and gaps in one area may affect the others.

Fluency has three main components: speed, accuracy, and prosody. Fluent readers read words accurately at an appropriate speed using suitable rhythm, phrasing, and tone. Fluent reading should sound like natural speech.

There are many instructional practices to assist students in increasing fluency. Readers may benefit from practicing sight words, learning a variety of decoding strategies, rereading texts, and engaging in modeled and shared reading experiences.

Review Questions

Before we go, let’s apply what we’ve learned. What is the relationship between fluency and the other four pillars of early literacy? How do they work together to develop strong reading skills?

Let’s consider the following situations in which fluency affects comprehension.

Anna

Anna recognizes few words automatically and relies heavily on sounding out to figure out unfamiliar words. Her reading rate is below her expected first-grade level. By the time she sounds out the last words in a sentence, she has forgotten the words she read previously. How does this affect Anna’s comprehension, and what instructional practices could improve her fluency?

Luis

Luis automatically recognizes most of the words he reads, and he uses several strategies to easily figure out the few words he doesn’t already know. He reads very quickly and tends to ignore the periods between sentences. How does this affect Luis’s comprehension, and what instructional practices could improve his fluency?

That’s all, thanks for watching and happy reading.