Facts About Fluency & How to Help Your Reader Become Fluent

It is very likely that you’ve been reading with your child, or your students, and thought, “Finally! They are reading the words accurately now, but.... this is so painfully S-L-O-W.” First, let’s pause for a minute to celebrate the fact that your reader is accurate! 👏🏼 Next, let's talk about what fluency is and how you can help to improve it.
 

What is Fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read a text smoothly, just as if you were having a conversation. Fluency is made up of 3 components: rate, accuracy and prosody.

If your student is reading a low number of words per minute, they are lacking adequate rate.

If your student is making many errors while reading, they are lacking accuracy.

And if your student sounds like a robot when reading aloud, they're lacking appropriate prosody.

All 3 skills are important for a reader to master!

Why is Fluency Important?

Fluency is often referred to as the bridge between word recognition and comprehension.

Consider this analogy.

If a bridge is “out,” chances are there will be a detour available to complete your route.  However, it’s likely that the detour will take more time, there will be more traffic, it will be less efficient, use more fuel and could cause some major frustration.

The same is true for a reader.  Without fluency, it will take longer to finish a passage and the reader will have used less efficient strategies that required more brain energy. And let's not forget frustration. A disfluent reader ends the trip with less fuel to apply toward comprehension.

How Can Fluency Be Improved?
 

Let's take a look at how we can help a child improve their reading rate, accuracy and prosody, which in turn will help improve comprehension.

(NOTE: Make sure you don't miss the Fluency Flowchart freebie at the end of this post!)

Improve Reading RATE: Repeated Reads

One way to improve reading rate is by using repeated reads. Select a passage at the child’s independent/instructional level. Have the child read for 1 minute and track how many words were read correctly. Then set a goal. Have the student reread the passage until the goal is met!

Most people only think of doing repeated reads with passages, but remember, you can do repeated reads with a list of letters/sounds, words, phrases, or sentences. Tailor this to your reader’s needs.

Quick Tip: It can be fun to show your reader their progress by recording their first read and then record them again once they have gained more fluency. They'll be so proud of their progress!

Improve Reading ACCURACY: Direct Instruction and Immediate Feedback

This is very similar to improving reading rate, but with an extra step to address accuracy. During the first 1 minute read of a text, make note of any errors. Do not correct any errors within the 1 minute read, but once the time is up, immediately provide instruction and feedback (after you praise the student for something they did well of course – remember to always be building confidence). Once you’ve gone over all of the errors, your student can try another 1 minute read to ensure their accuracy has improved.  

Quick Tip: Some students HATE the timer. If you have a student like this, instead of using a 1-minute countdown timer, just use a stopwatch so there's no beeping. You'll just have to keep an eye on the time.

Improve Reading PROSODY: Modeling & Scooping

Modeling is the best way to improve prosody (emotion, intonation, rhythm, stress). This is easy to build into read alouds and social interactions, but to really make improvements, the students need to be actively involved and the concepts need to be explicitly taught. Here are some ideas on how to do just that:

• Pull out a sentence from a text your student has just read
• Explain that fluent readers group words together in phrases instead of reading words one by one, and that reading in phrases helps us to understand meaning
• Model reading the sentence choppy, then model what the sentence would sound like if you were speaking it, not reading
• Draw scoops under the text to connect words in phrases
• Have your student practice reading the sentence fluently
  

Quick Tip: Sometimes showing "non-examples" is a great way to teach a concept. You can get some really good laughs out of modeling fluency incorrectly.

Other Important Items to Remember:

Choosing the correct text to work with is so important. You’re not going to see stellar results if the text you hand your child is too hard. Fluency work needs to be done with independent/instructional level materials. This most likely means you’ll be working with decodable readers. If you don’t have decodable readers that you love, we have resources that WE love and that are tried, tested, and loved by kids! Click HERE to see what we use.  

Not all of your students will need explicit instruction in all 3 components of fluency. Some students may have no problem with rate, but read without any expression or prosody. Other students read with great expression but their rate is very slow. You know your reader best. Meet them where they are.

Fluency Flowchart Freebie

Sometimes it's helpful to have a cheat sheet! Download a copy of the Fluency Flowchart by clicking the image below. In this free download, you'll learn how to identify which area of fluency your reader is struggling with, and specific activities you can use to help them become more fluent. Enjoy!

If you're interested in learning more about other aspects of the Science of Reading, check out our course, "The Science of Reading: Revealed."

In this 10 module training, we give you a Science of Reading-backed lesson plan and then walk you through each step with how-to videos (yes, we actually SHOW you what to do!), printable materials that you can use right away, and SO much more!

You’ll gain an in-depth understanding on the following topics:

✨ Introduction to the Science of Reading
✨ Review: Card & Blending Drills
✨ Phonological Awareness
✨ Guided Discovery
✨ Coding & Reading Words
✨ Encoding
✨ Oral Reading
✨ Fluency
✨ Comprehension
✨ Vocabulary & Morphology
 

We’ve made sure to make each module fun and engaging and completely applicable to your classroom! 🙌🏻

We wholeheartedly believe in the quote, "Every teacher deserves to know the Science of Reading, and every child deserves a teacher who knows it", which is why we've priced the course at just $27.

Click >>HERE<< if you'd like to learn more!