There are many techniques to use with students to improve their reading fluency. Using multisensory activities, such as tracing, copying, and writing words, helps students see letter patterns in their minds. To establish these early literacy skills, it is important to give students repeated exposure to letters, letter combinations, and words by practicing with flash cards, games, and activities that strengthen the connection between visual and auditory representations. To become fluent readers, students need to gain automaticity in letter identification, letter/sound identification, and word identification. Reading fluency is a skill students need to have to comprehend any text they are readingthe major objective of reading instruction. Fluent readers are able to recognize words automatically, group individual words into meaningful phrases, and quickly apply the skills needed to identify unknown words. Research shows that students need intentional reading fluency instruction. Word recognition fluency, while not the goal of reading instruction, is necessary for good comprehension (Carnine, 1977). Why Is It Important?Īccording to a report from the National Reading Panel (NICHHD 2000), repeatedly reading a text and monitoring a students oral reading supports increased fluency. As a result, these students increase their fluency. Students who read with prosody are motivated to read more often and enjoy reading aloud. Reading with expression brings texts to life because these texts begin to sound more like natural speech or storytelling. This component is what brings joy to reading aloud: It includes using different voices for different characters, whispering scary stories, emphasizing groups of funny words, and creating moods with tone and cadence. Prosody is comprised of features such as pitch, tone, expression, stress, and rhythm. Its difficult to remember what youve read and to relate the ideas to your own background knowledge if the act of reading itself is laborious. Once students achieve automaticity, they are able to focus on comprehending text rather than trying to decode words. Automaticity (performance without conscious attention) occurs when students are able to automatically identify words (word recognition). Two major components of reading fluency are automaticity and prosody. The following figure (Eden & Moats, 2002) shows the skills that are necessary if students are to become fluent readers: Letter Recognition Readers who normally read at an adequate speed may slow down or re-read text when sentence structure or vocabulary becomes increasingly difficult to understand.įluent readers recognize words automatically, read aloud effortlessly and with expression, divide the text into meaningful chunks, change emphasis and tone appropriately, and pause within and at the ends of sentences.įluent reading is the culmination of all those discreet skills we acquired as we learned to read. Fluency is not a stage of development rather, it changes depending on what students are reading. Fluency is generally defined as the rate (words per minute), accuracy (number of words correctly identified), and expression with which students read.
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