Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read a text correctly and quickly. Find out what strategies are recommended to improve students' fluency and how to incorporate those strategies at home and at school.
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For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time
Teachers do their best to improve students’ fluency, but sometimes the information they have to work with is incomplete and, therefore, leads them down the wrong path. For example, silent reading or 'Round Robin' reading seem like good ways to improve fluency. But, in fact, increasing fluency requires more practice, more support, and more guided oral reading than either of these strategies can deliver.
What should fluency instruction look like? And, what can teachers do to help students whose fluency is far behind their peers'? This article should help practitioners use of fluency-based assessments and select instructional practices.
Finding the Right Book Level: PALS Equivalencies
Different book leveling systems each have unique ways of describing the age- and grade-level appropriateness of books. This chart provides equivalency information across six leveling systems: Basal level/PALS, Guided Reading, DRA, Rigby PM, Reading Recovery, and Lexile.
How Fluently Do Our Children Read?
Fluency means reading quickly and accurately with proper phrasing, expression, and attention to syntax (or word order). Find out what percentage of America's fourth graders read fluently in this report of a national assessment of oral reading.
Understanding and Assessing Fluency
Learn what reading fluency is, why it is critical to make sure that students have sufficient fluency, how we should assess fluency, and how to best provide practice and support for all students.
Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring for Fluency: The Details
Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers — and the words-correct per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. Here's how teachers can use it to make well-informed and timely decisions about the instructional needs of their students.
View the results of the 2006 study on oral reading fluency, "Oral Reading Fluency: 90 Years of Measurement," by Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal.
Part of teaching reading is motivating the children to practice, practice, practice. Find out how to use children's poetry to encourage kids to read.
Reader's Theater: Giving Students a Reason to Read Aloud
The reader's theater strategy blends students' desire to perform with their need for oral reading practice. Reader's Theater offers an entertaining and engaging means of improving fluency and enhancing comprehension.
Guided oral reading is an instructional strategy that can help students improve a variety of reading skills, including fluency. This article explains how to implement it in your classroom.
English Language Learners and the Five Essential Components of Reading Instruction
Find out how teachers can play to the strengths and shore up the weaknesses of English Language Learners in each of the Reading First content areas.
Fluency: Instructional Guidelines and Student Activities
The best strategy for developing reading fluency is to provide your students with many opportunities to read the same passage orally several times. To do this, you should first know what to have your students read. Second, you should know how to have your students read aloud repeatedly.
Questions About Fluency Instruction
The following are answers to frequent questions teachers have about fluency instruction.
Fluency develops gradually over time and through practice. At the earliest stage of reading development, students' oral reading is slow and labored because students are just learning to "break the code" – to attach sounds to letters and to blend letter sounds into recognizable words.
What Works in Fluency Instruction
Fluency, reading in a fast and fluid manner, is what often distinguishes to observers the reading performance of a good reader from a poor reader. Find out what the research says about the two most common instructional methods for developing fluency: guided oral reading and independent silent reading.
Fluent, Automatic Reading of Text
Being a fluent reader is an important part of being a successful reader. Here is an overview of considerations related to fluency, and techniques teachers can use for promoting fluency in the classroom.
Two Methods for Developing Fluency
Beginning readers are not usually fluent, but classroom practices can help them develop this important skill. This article describes both direct and indirect methods for increasing fluency through classroom instruction.
While the ability to read words accurately is a necessary skill in learning to read, the speed at which this is done becomes a critical factor in ensuring that children understand what they read.
Practice: Practical Ideas for Parents
School-aged children build skills in a variety of areas to become successful readers. Learn activities parents can use at home to expand their knowledge of letter/sound relationships and skills in decoding, writing, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension of a variety of texts.
Help Children Develop Fluent, Reflective Reading
This list of tips provides concrete strategies teachers can use to develop fluent, reflective reading.