What makes up fluency

Why are reading fluency and reading comprehension so highly correlated? Jay Samuels, a professor and researcher well known for his work in fluency, put forth a theory called the automaticity theory.

According to Dr. Samuels, people have a limited amount of mental energy. If you want to multitask or to become proficient at a complex task such as reading, you first need to master the component tasks so you can do them automatically.

For example, a reader who must focus his or her attention on decoding words may not have enough mental energy left over to think about the meaning of the text. However, a fluent reader who can automatically decode the words can instead give full attention to comprehending the text. To become proficient readers, our students need to become automatic with text so they can pay attention to the meaning.

Students become fluent by reading. Some students learn to read fluently without explicit instruction. For others, however, fluency doesn't develop in the course of normal classroom instruction. Research analyzed by the National Reading Panel suggests that just encouraging students to read independently isn't the most effective way to improve reading achievement.

Too often, simply encouraging at-risk students to read doesn't result in increased reading on their part. During sustained silent reading, at-risk readers may get a book with mostly pictures and look at the pictures, or they choose a difficult book so they will look like everyone else and then pretend to read. Even if at-risk students do read, they read more slowly than the other students. In a minute reading period, a proficient reader who reads words a minute silently could read 2, words. In the same 10 minutes, an at-risk student who reads 50 words a minute would only read words.

This is equal reading time but certainly not an equal number of words read. These students need to read more, but just asking them to read on their own often doesn't work. The National Reading Panel has concluded that a more effective course of action is for us to explicitly teach developing readers how to read fluently, step by step. How do we explicitly teach students to read fluently?

The National Reading Panel found data supporting three strategies that improve fluency, comprehension, and reading achievement—teacher modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring. The first strategy is teacher modeling. Research demonstrates that various forms of modeling can improve reading fluency. Examples of teacher modeling include:. Teacher modeling involves more than just listening to someone else read.

Students must be actively involved percent of the time and in a multisensory way. Teacher modeling teaches word recognition in a meaningful context, demonstrates correct phrasing, and gives students practice tracking across the page.

Save to:. Save Create a List. Create a list. Save Back. Defining Fluency By Timothy V. Grades PreK—K , 1—2 , 3—5. Featured Book. View not found. Download the PDF from here. Related Subjects. Fluency Reading Comprehension. Appears in This Collection. Prosody depends on both accuracy and rate. In order to read with expression, the student must be able to read words efficiently and break the text into meaningful syntactic and semantic units.

Prosody has a reciprocal relationship with comprehension. For a student to read with prosody, they must be gaining some understanding of the text as they read it if they know the appropriate intonations and pitch to use. Likewise, by reading with prosody, they are more likely to be processing information as they read it, which leads to better retention and comprehension.

Students who exhibit good prosody in oral reading tend to have higher comprehension scores from silent reading as well Zimmerman et al.

Components of fluency. Accuracy Accurate reading requires students to be able to pronounce written words correctly. The Reading Eggs program provides a series of lessons using explicit teaching to build skills in phonic decoding. These are essential skills needed to develop fluency in reading. The lessons present phonological skills and word recognition in the context of connected text as well as individual word recognition.

Using focus words in sentences and short stories, for both reading and construction of text, creates a sense of meaning in students' understanding of language. The Reading Eggs program models fluent reading and encourages repeat reading of texts. It has a library of over leveled books to provide wide reading material for any level of recreational reader.

Each book can be read repeated times, encouraging fluency in that text. The library books end with a quiz, which requires reading comprehension. Reading Eggs rewards students at every step, with congratulatory sounds and messages, with eggs and points and cards to be collected, with critters to earn, and certificates to be printed. Your child will build confidence in their reading fluency as they progress through the program. Try Reading Eggs here to see how your child's reading and comprehension skills can improve in just weeks.

Each of my three kids aged 3, 5, and 7 beg me to let them play and I think that is how Reading Eggs really differs from the others; it is not a chore for them to be using it. After they complete their lessons, they are then allowed to play in the extra [learning areas] and games which gives them an incentive to finish the lessons well. They are learning their letters and the sounds they make to reading small words in as little as ten minutes a day.

I have to put a limit on how much time they are allowed to be on Reading Eggs, or they will be on there all day. I will continue to use Reading Eggs for many years to come and cannot recommend it highly enough.