The Role of Reading Fluency

While the Science of Reading identifies reading fluency as an essential skill, it is often neglected due to the overemphasis of phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphology. Some students who have sufficiently developed early decoding skills with reading intervention continue to receive instruction in advanced phonemic awareness and word study.  This is inefficient and limits valuable instruction time.  Instead, students could be applying their new decoding skills to other components of reading such as orthographic processing for automatic word recognition, fluency, and comprehension.   

Fluency is one of the essential components of reading supported by research, as identified in the National Reading Panel report of 2000. Here are five strategies for intentional and explicit fluency instruction and practice.

Strategies on How to Improve Reading Fluency 

1. Start with short, self-contained paragraphs or sentences

First, carefully consider when to introduce connected text.  Don’t start too early if students significantly lack letter/sound knowledge, decoding, and some beginning sight words.  There should be some level of automaticity with these early skills so that reading connected text is not too difficult and frustrating.  Next, introduce contextual reading with short, self-contained passages, or even single sentences for very young or low level readers.  Depending on the age and ability level of your students, you may choose highly controlled text.   When students first start reading connected text, have them track each word with their finger.   

2. Concept imagery and reading comprehension 

Teach your students to read for imagery and meaning.  This facilitates the use of context clues, along with decoding automaticity, to improve prosody. Reading fluency and comprehension begin to work as reciprocal skills.  You can use strategies from the Visualizing and Verbalizing program to develop imagery for the text.  If they read a passage and miscall too many words, ask “Did that make sense?  What do you picture for that?”    

3. Pre-read specific words 

Identify challenge words, such as irregular spellings and academic vocabulary, to decode prior to reading in context and to store in orthographic memory.  This allows them to read through the text with more speed and fluency.  If you are using the Seeing Stars program, reinforce high frequency sight words with symbol imagery exercises.    

4. Repeated readings 

Have students read the text multiple times, either during the same session or in later sessions.  Three readings of the same text has shown to increase rate and accuracy.  Time students and record in a reading/writing journal or other progress monitoring document.  Students are often motivated with a timed task as they try to improve their score.   However, direct them to read every word and not to read too fast, which may disrupt accuracy and comprehension.   

5. Assisted reading 

The teacher reads the text aloud while the student(s) reads along. Students benefit by hearing and matching the pace, inflection, and tone of a skilled reader.

REMINDER - For Further Information on Reading Fluency

READ CHAPTER 17 IN YOUR SEEING STARS TEACHER’S MANUAL –INTEGRATION FOR CONTEXTUAL READING FLUENCY AND COMPREHENSION. 

Fluency practice, like other reading skills, should be intentional and explicit.  As you continue to use the reading circles for diagnosis and instruction (p. 66 in the Seeing Stars Manual), observe when students are demonstrating some automaticity in the Auditory and Visual circles, and begin focusing more instruction time and emphasis on contextual reading fluency and comprehension.   _______________________________________________________________________________________

The Seeing Stars Manual presents a complete scope and sequence for developing phonological and orthographic processing in reading and spelling.  The steps explicitly and systematically teach letter-sound knowledge, phonics, word recognition and fluency, all necessary for contextual reading comprehension.  

If you are unfamiliar with the Seeing Stars program and interested in developing symbol imagery for struggling readers and students with dyslexia, you can purchase the manual to get started.  The manual is also included in the complete kit, which includes letter-sound cards, syllable cards, a sight word list and other teacher and student resources for full implementation.   Or if you are interested in learning more about symbol imagery and the Seeing Stars program, download a free sampler for more information.