Fluency (WHAT)
The WHAT of Fluency
Have you ever listened to a student read and thought, “They can sound out the words, but…they sound like a robot,” or “they don’t have a clue what this is about”?If so, you are not alone, and you are in the right place! One likely key factor at play is reading fluency. Fluency is the bridge between decoding (sounding out words on a page) and comprehension (understanding and connecting with the ideas).
Throughout this Literacy Loop series, we will take a deep dive into reading fluency, an essential but often overlooked aspect of reading instruction and a key to unlocking reading success. We are excited to explore what fluency is, why it matters across all grades, and how to build it into everyday instruction. Thanks for joining us!
What is fluency?
At its core, fluency is defined as reading with accuracy, rate, and prosody, each explained below. Although it might sound simple, the impact that reading with fluency has on developing and consolidating reading and understanding is widespread and often misunderstood (more to come in next week’s newsletter).
Key Components of a Fluent Reader:
Accuracy: Reading with accuracy means reading words correctly; we typically aim for an accuracy rate of about 95% or higher.
Rate: Rate is the speed at which we can read the words on the page. This is often measured as Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM).
Reading with fluency can sometimes be misinterpreted as reading as quickly as possible. That is not the goal. We are very careful with how we talk about rate when working with students, asking them to read “as best as you can”.
As students progress into secondary school, rate (whether reading aloud or silently) becomes increasingly complex and important; students need to read quickly enough to free up mental space for comprehension but slowly enough to attend to meaning and expression.
Prosody: Prosody is the ability to use our voice to convey meaning in a text. This involves reading with expression, intonation, phrasing, and attending to punctuation.
A fluent reader integrates all three components seamlessly, drawing on their letter-sound knowledge to decode words and their language knowledge to make meaning.
Coming up next
While fluency is often emphasized in elementary, it remains a critical skill to develop all the way through high school. In our next issue, we examine what the research says about why fluency is so powerful and why it is one of the most efficient levers for improving comprehension from the earliest grades through high school.
