If you had to give a synopsis of a movie after watching it for the very first time, and you fast forward through the first half of it, would you be able to come up with a very accurate recap? Or, let’s say you watched the movie at regular speed, but there were 2-3 important scenes skipped over in the beginning, middle, and end. It would make it pretty challenging to give a proper summary, right? This is exactly what it’s like for a child struggling with reading fluency. I’m going to share with you tons of fluency fundamentals and strategies and really show you why you should never skip teaching fluency!
At the end of this post is a great free resource to help you teach reading fluency.
Why is fluency important?
Fluency is the key to strong comprehension. It’s so important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension – just like you watch a movie! There are several important scenes throughout a movie that are going to help you understand the overall storyline, theme, and main idea at the end.
What is fluency?
Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. We’ll dig into how each of these areas contributes to fluency:
Accuracy
Accuracy encompasses the ability to identify sounds and words, blend phonemes, recognize letter patterns, as well as use letter sounds and context clues to figure out the words in a text. It’s pretty self-explanatory – If you have no idea what words you’re reading, there’s no way you’ll be able to comprehend the text.
Rate
There’s not a specific rate that’s required to be achieved, but more so the concept of automaticity. The goal is to get your students reading with quick and effortless word identification. When they can use less energy on word recognition, they can use more energy for comprehension. Slow readers may have great accuracy, but they can easily forget what the start of their sentence or paragraph said. Whereas on the other hand, fast readers may read smoothly, but can’t understand the text because they read it so quickly. There’s a balance of speed that must be achieved!
Expression
I love to focus on prosody when talking about expression. Prosody is the overall tone and rhythm of the text. It’s composed of stress patterns, which are syllables, and variations in voice pitch. This area of fluency can be challenging for students because expression isn’t typically shown in a text. They have to use meaning from the text in order to find the relevant expression. One comprehension teaching strategy I like to use is to listen to each of my students read aloud. If their expression aligns with the meaning of the text, I can tell if that child is understanding the text.
Comprehension
The last piece of the fluency puzzle – comprehension. This is one of the most important pieces of fluency. Teachers will sometimes overlook comprehension as being a part of fluency because they’re focused on accuracy and rate. It’s essential that you look at if your students can answer questions about what they just read or if they can retell or summarize the text. Reading cannot be considered fluent until your students can comprehend the text that they’ve just read.
What are some strategies for teaching fluency?
- Read Aloud, Read Aloud, Read Aloud!
Reading aloud to your students is so important for modeling fluency. Your students can get every area of fluency addressed when they listen to you read. Your accuracy of words, the rate in which you’re reading, and the expression that you use for different characters and events in the story are all very important. Also be sure to frequently stop throughout your reading and ask your students comprehension or foreshadowing type questions. This will test their understanding as you read. They don’t have to be complex questions, even just – What do you think is going to happen next?
- Reader’s Theater
Reader’s theater is a great way to help your kids understand the importance of fluency, and specifically expression. The goal isn’t necessarily to get your students to memorize the characters’ lines, but to get them reading their lines with the kind of expression that each character is experiencing. The goal is also to emphasize the importance of rate and accuracy. If an audience is watching and listening to the performance, it can be challenging for them to understand the storyline of the play if they can’t interpret each of the characters’ lines.
You’d be surprised how inspired some students become when they participate in reader’s theater. Sometimes just knowing they are “performing” or a character gives them confidence and the motivation to be a strong reader. 🙂
- Focus on Sight Words
If you know me, you know I love sight words. The more sight words are practiced, the more students will be able to recognize them. The magic number is 12! A student has to be exposed to a word 12 times before being expected to remember it. When your young readers have a strong bank of sight words, their fluency is going to greatly improve because they’re already recognizing more than half the words they’re reading. If sight words are already known, they’ll be able to spend more time and energy on building their vocabularies with new words. If you’d like to learn more about sight words and their multitude of benefits, you can check out my previous posts – Why Sight Words Are Important for Building Better Readers and Interactive Sight Word Activities for Improving Reading Skills.
- Peer Reading
Similar to you reading aloud as the teacher, pair your students up so that they can read aloud together. In the beginning, I recommend pairing a more fluent reader with less fluent readers. Encourage the groups to ask questions as they read. This will benefit both students immensely. The less fluent reader is getting one-on-one attention with their reading and getting to listen to fluent reading, while the more fluent reader is getting to take their own comprehension to a higher level by asking their partner questions about the text.
The general purpose and goal behind reading is to understand what you’re reading and gain knowledge from the text. Fluency is the key to strong comprehension. Never skip teaching fluency and always recognize and incorporate each area of fluency! 🙂 It will greatly affect your students’ comprehension!
So if you’re interested in that free resource to help you teach fluency, just fill in the form below and I will send it straight to your inbox.
