11/14/2024

What is the Definition of Fluency in Reading?

The five pillars of reading instruction, also known as the five pillars of early literacy, are a set of key components the National Reading Panel developed to explain the concepts that form the foundation of an effective reading program.

These pillars support the science of reading approach, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 

• Phonemic awareness: The ability to identify the different sounds that make up speech.
• Phonics: The ability to match sounds to letters or letter groups
• Fluency: The ability to read accurately and quickly.
• Vocabulary: The ability to understand the meaning of words.
• Comprehension: The ability to read a text and understand its overall meaning.

While each of these pillars may seem to represent an individual literacy concept, they are intertwined. To learn to read proficiently, students must build skills simultaneously across the pillars.

This blog post focuses on fluency, the third pillar, its role in literacy acquisition, and how you can help your students build skills in this area.

Why Fluency is Important

Fluent readers can read accurately and smoothly, and understand what they’re reading. Students who struggle with the mechanics of reading have difficulty mastering these skills. Research has shown students with strong oral fluency skills are more likely to be successful across other pillars of the literacy acquisition process. This is because fluency serves as a bridge between being able to decode words and comprehending what is being read. 

While fluency often is mistakenly defined as the ability to read quickly, it actually refers to a reader’s ability to read with accuracy, speed, and proper expression. As students develop these fluency skills, they strengthen their reading comprehension skills and become better readers.

Accuracy

Fluent readers can identify letters, letter patterns, and isolated words accurately and quickly. 

• To read text accurately, readers must first be able to identify individual words. They must also recognize that letters (graphemes) have associated sounds (phonemes). 
• Then, they must correctly identify and process (or decode) those sounds into words. They need to understand which irregular words cannot be decoded. 
• Once readers can identify a word, they have to understand its meaning. 

Fluent readers can accurately identify words and their associated meanings simultaneously and instantaneously—thus developing automaticity. Accuracy is intertwined with the theory of automaticity, which is the idea that students develop their word recognition skills enough so they’re able to focus their energy on understanding what they’re reading. Automaticity is a necessary component of fluency, but it also takes time and practice to develop.

Speed

While reading speed isn’t the same as fluency, it still plays an important role. When students can read quickly while simultaneously comprehending the meaning of the text, it shows they have mastered critical literacy skills. At the same time, students may be able to read fast but not fully understand what they’re reading—which is why fluency shouldn’t be based solely on speed.

Expression

Expression refers to a reader’s ability to read orally in a way that sounds like spoken language and is a key part of fluency. It includes tone, pitch, volume, emphasis, and rhythm and ultimately signifies a student’s understanding of what is being read. Students with a strong grasp of expression pause at appropriate times, emphasize important words, and use emotion when reading aloud.

How Fluency Affects Reading Comprehension

Fluency gives students the skills to decode words and attach meaning to them. When your students boost their fluency skills, they can free up cognitive energy in a way that allows them to focus on finding meaning within the texts they’re reading. This allows for a more efficient application of higher-order thinking, known as the theory of automaticity.

Evidence-Based Strategies for Teaching Fluency

To address fluency, teachers must have an understanding of the role of each of the processes involved in learning how to read. This equips them to teach all types of students, including Emergent Bilinguals or those with reading disabilities. According to the National Center on Improving Literacy, some of the best ways you can support your students in becoming more fluent leaders include:

• Providing them with models of fluent reading 
• Practicing reading passages with your guidance
• Monitoring their progress

Teacher Modeling

In this instructional model, educators demonstrate fluent reading by reading aloud to students. This approach helps students understand what fluent reading sounds like in terms of pace, expression, accuracy, and comprehension. By consistently modeling fluent reading, you demonstrate what proficient reading looks and sounds like, which students can then mimic in their own practice.

Repeated Reading

By asking students to read the same text multiple times, teachers can use repetition to build reading accuracy, speed, and expression. This instructional strategy helps students develop fluency by giving them repeated exposure to the same text, allowing them to focus on improving their fluency rather than decoding new words.

Progress Monitoring

Regular progress monitoring assesses students' reading development and guides future literacy instruction. By measuring a student's reading skills over time, you can objectively evaluate improvement and determine what instructional strategies are effective—and where students need additional support.

How Reading Aloud Supports Fluency and Reading Comprehension

When students have someone modeling fluent reading for them, they learn how a reader’s voice reflects the meaning of a text. You can show them what fluent reading looks and sounds like by reading aloud to your students and adjusting your tone for emotions and expressions, pausing at appropriate times, and emphasizing important words. After modeling text for your students, you can ask them to read it independently. Many evidence-based reading techniques support fluency skills at the classroom level or one-on-one with a teacher.

Some other methods to get students engaged in reading aloud and developing fluency are:

• Student-adult reading: This is meant for one-on-one sessions between a teacher and student, where the instructor reads the text first to model fluent reading, and the student reads the same passage back to them.
• Choral reading: This is an excellent way to help your students practice oral reading without the anxiety that can come with other reading methods, like popcorn reading.
• Tape-assisted reading: Like choral reading, students practice oracy by reading with audiobooks. You can adjust for different reading levels, eventually asking students to read the text independently of the audiobook.
• Partner reading: Divide students into pairs, partnering of different reading levels. The stronger reader can serve as a model for their less-fluent partner, helping them with word recognition and supporting them. You may also choose to pair students of the same reading level together.
• Readers’ theater: This exercise makes reading fun by involving the whole class in a play. It is enjoyable and gives your students a reason to reread texts and practice their fluency. It also promotes “cooperative interaction with peers” and makes reading more appealing.

What are the Approaches to Developing Fluency in Lexia Core5 Reading?

Lexia® Core5® Reading addresses automaticity and fluency through targeted, systematic activities that enhance processing speed. The program provides all students—including Emerging Bilinguals and students with dyslexia and other learning differences—with a systematic and structured approach to developing the fundamental areas of reading, from phonological awareness to fluency to comprehension. The program’s scope & sequence builds students’ foundational and advanced literacy skills at each grade level and includes activities that address automaticity and fluency.

Automaticity

Early instruction targets automatic word recognition and automaticity with sub-skills that contribute to fluent reading. One way to promote these skills is through warm-up activities and review units designed to consolidate previously learned skills and bring them to a level of automaticity. 

Core5 includes warm-up activities and review units designed to consolidate previously learned skills and bring students up to the level of automaticity.

• Students engage in warm-up activities for approximately two to three minutes at the beginning of each session. 
• Since students differ in their processing speeds, the pace of these warm-ups is based on individual performance. It allows the students to increase their rate of response relative to their level of automaticity.
• Warm-up content follows the same sequence as activities included in previous levels. Warm-ups begin with letters and sound-symbol correspondences and move to recognizing both regular and irregular words and key elements related to comprehension.

Fluency

Efficient readers integrate automatic decoding with knowledge of sentence structure and meaning. In Core5, fluency instruction is built systematically through work that focuses on important aspects of sentence structure and activities that involve the analysis of intonation, emphasis, phrasing, rhythm, and rhyme scheme. These activities address critical elements of fluency related to prosody. 

• Fluency activities include wide reading of informational and narrative texts with opportunities for shared and repeated reading. Specifically, in the passage fluency activities, students engage in shared reading with synchronized highlighting of the text. Then, they fill in missing words in passages. This format promotes monitoring for meaning while reading. Teachers can measure and report accuracy and words per minute. 
• Fluency activities also include work at the paragraph level through the timed silent reading of narrative and expository text that follows a maze format. These silent reading activities are designed to increase processing speed while focusing on meaning.

Lexia Skill Builders® and Lexia Lessons® support Core5 and help develop additional skills important for reading fluency, including oral reading with a focus on expression and appropriate prosody. 

Along with Core5, the Lexia® LETRS® Suite, a professional learning program that reviews all of the processes that go into reading, supports literacy instruction—including fluency. The course teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to improve instructional practice and achieve long-term systemic change in literacy instruction. 

Teaching reading requires a deep understanding of the processes and science behind it. Learn how LETRS, rooted in the science of reading, empowers teachers to support their students.