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Fluency is one of the most often overlooked skills that beginning readers need to possess in order to have future success in the classroom. Fluency is the ability to read naturally, quickly, and without making common errors (such as repeating words, failing to heed punctuation, or ignoring the emotional tenor of a phrase). When students are first beginning reading, their oral fluency is quite low- they may read straight through a period, fail to emphasize appropriate words, and resort to sounding out atypical spelling patterns (like saying "Tye-on" for "tion). In a world where reading a text outloud for an audience is not a typical demand of most jobs, teachers often let fluency fall by the wayside. However, it is a phenomenally important skill precisely because students are constantly being asked to read out-loud in school. Students who shy away from the opportunity to read in front of their peers because they fear they will "sound funny" will often shy away from answering questions and from engaging with the text. Attaining a high level of oral reading fluency ensures that students will participate to the best of their ability. Further, because the awareness of how letters and sounds match up (phonological awareness) is one of the biggest predictors of future reading success, high levels of fluency which require a great amount of awareness of letter sounds, will help struggling readers become strong readers in the future.

So, fluency is important... but how does a teacher assess and cultivate fluency? First, a child's fluency must be tested. Unfortunately for the average classroom teacher, this means that you will have to pull students aside individually. If you don't have access to the DRA2, a common comprehension and fluency test, you will need to create your own fluency assessment. To do this, find 3 passages of between 50 and 100 words- one below, one on, and one above grade level. Print out the passages on pieces of paper that you can keep track of. Next, grab a stopwatch and a student. Have the student read each passage out loud to you- record their hestitations, errors, and repetitions as well as the time it takes them to read the passage. Divide the number of words in the passage by the time it took to read it to get the child's words-per-minute reading speed. You can visit many online resources to find out how many WPM are typical for each grade level. You can also measure their accuracy by dividing the number of words correctly read by the number of words total in the passage. 95% accuracy is a child's instructional reading level. Once you find a passage where they student can read about 95% of the words accurately, your goal should be to raise this number to 98-100%, a child's independent reading level. Once you have obtained a student's WPM and accuaracy rates, make sure to take note of their treatment of punctuation and the general smoothness of their reading.

Now that you have an idea of each student's level of fluency, there are LOTS of activites you can do to increase it. One way is to do guided reading groups. Here, have students whisper read to you and partner read to each other. Believe it or not, even without further instruction, just pracitcing reading out loud will increase fluency which will help students for years to come. Another easy way to increase reading fluency is to have students listen to books on tape or to your read alouds. Just hearing a model of fluent reading will help students understand what reading should sound like. You can also have students tape record, listen to, and critique their own reading. This will not only increase their awareness of their own fluency level, but allows students to partake in fluency training without direct teacher assistance.

Fluency training is one of the most important parts of creating engaged and successful readers. I urge you to incorporate fluency training into your classroom today.

Learn more about this author, Jessica Sullivan.
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