Reading Fluency

What is Reading Fluency?

Reading fluency is the power to read quickly and accurately. The more fluent a reader, the more he or she automatically groups and recognizes words. Fluent readers excel at oral reading, which is highlighted by smooth and natural expression (Learningrx.com).

Challenges with Reading Fluency

Fluency is the beginning step to a student being able to read for accuracy, but also for comprehension. If a student is not able to decode words, read accurately or fluently then they will have trouble comprehending which will lead them to not want to read as they get older and over time they will read less and less. These students will struggle for the rest of their lives, so it is very important to teach students fluency and practice, practice, practice reading all the time and as earlier as possible. For students who struggle, technology is creating ways to help them create opportunities and the skills to become better readers. With the right teaching methods students can learn to love to read.

Solutions to increase Fluency

There are several online resources that provide audiobooks, leveled readers and other digital formats of books for students to use to read, listen and learn with. Readinga-z.com offers several free samples of leveled readers, but you can create an account to access many more items. Using readinga-z.com or other sites that have been listed in this site can allow students to listen to books, chapters or stories on their electronic devices without anyone else knowing what they are listening to, which can help to increase their willingness to listen and/or read. By having students read the story first and then listen to an audio or digital version can help to increase fluency, as well as comprehension of the story. This enables students to identify were they might have made a mistake or a part of the story where they did not know how to pronounce a word or misinterpreted the information.

Text to speech applications (Speak It!) can assist both individual and groups of students with reading. During choral reading sessions, students can each take turn reading portions of a story and then after each student reads their part they can use the text-to-speech application to read the same part, so all of the students can hear the story again and find mistakes or make further connections.

Another helpful tool for teachers to record data and analyze student progress with fluency is AIMSweb. This website allows teachers to track progress and run assessments of student reading to gather data that is useful in developing further lessons and activities to continue the progress of each individual student.

Research in Reading Fluency

The research shows that students who struggle with fluency can develop several reading errors or challenges with their reading skills. According to several studies fluency challenges can include: decoding words, inflection, comprehension, understanding main ideas and concepts, as well as word identification. Explicit, systematic phonics instruction, in which students are taught letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns, and how to apply this knowledge in reading, helps children learn to read more effectively (National Reading Panel, 2000). After students develop fluency in analyzing individual letters and sounds within words, they must develop more efficient decoding strategies (Moats, 1998). Fluency develops with extensive practice reading many different types of texts (Snow et al., 1998). Research has shown that repeated reading and other guided oral reading procedures can improve fluency and overall reading achievement (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Technologies that can help to increase Fluency

Using digital books, including guided reader and leveled readers, or text-to-speech applications can tremendously help students who are struggling to read. Below are a few applications and websites that help students read and possibly get them motivated to read more by giving them a little bit of helpful assistance.

Speak It! –Google browser based text-to-speech app

Select and Speak–Google browser based text-to-speech app

Directions for Read Aloud for many popular software programs–Microsoft Office text to speech function

Free ebooks–by Project Gutenberg

OverDrive.com–ebooks from local libraries

ditext.com–more links to etexts

AIMSweb–Reading resource for educators

How to download in ePub format–directions on how to create epub files

Videos of activities to increase Fluency

Fluency Activities that can be used to create online formats