Fluency (WHY)
The WHY of fluency
The importance of fluency is sometimes underestimated. We often think of fluency as reading with accuracy, rate, and prosody, but it is so much more than that; it is one of the most efficient levers for improving comprehension from the earliest grades through high school. The reason lies in what happens in the brain, and reading fluently gives us a window into that. Here are 2 things that develop when we target fluency in our practice.
Automatic Word Recognition: When we embed fluency practice in classrooms, we are building automatic word recognition: the ability to see a word and recognize it without having to sound it out. This means we add to our bank of ‘sight words’. The more words we know by sight, the less time we must spend on decoding or sounding out words.
Higher Cognitive Processes: Reading engages our working memory, which has a limited capacity. When too many processes compete for attention, working memory becomes overloaded, leaving little space for comprehension. Reading with fluency, with accuracy, rate, and prosody, is one way to alleviate the cognitive load placed on readers. The less time we have to dedicate to decoding words, the more space and cognitive energy we have to focus on meaning and thinking deeply—higher-level processes that we need to develop at all ages.
Key takeaway
The goal of fluency, and the reason we teach it, is this:
Automaticity withinword recognition (decoding),
so that the reader can devote sufficient attention and effort to comprehension
Spotlight on Tim Rasinski!
No discussion of fluency would be complete without mentioning Tim Rasinski, one of the most influential researchers in the field. His work has deepened our understanding of fluency and its role in reading success. Dr. Rasinski is an incredibly generous scholar and leader who shares tools and ideas on his website, including his multidimensional fluency rubric.
Coming up next
In the following newsletters, we will share practical, high-impact strategies for teaching fluency. We will begin with Scooping, using examples from elementary classrooms, and then explore Iceberg Reading, focused on secondary classrooms. Both strategies can be used from kindergarten to grade 12.
