Fluent reading is an essential component of reading and a critical skill to develop when creating literate students. But what is fluent reading, and why is it so important? In this post, we’ll explore the key components of fluent reading and why it’s so important for students of all ages.
What is Fluency?
When talking about reading fluency, we can describe the process as “reasonably accurate reading at an appropriate rate with suitable prosody, which leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation to read” (Hasbrouck and Glaser, 2012, p.13). Reading fluency is not a single, target skill that can be taught and developed in a classroom, but rather the development and automaticity of multiple skills working together to make reading sound effortless. I love what The University of Oregon Center for Teaching and Learning says about fluency: “Fluency is not an end in itself but a critical gateway to comprehension. Fluent reading frees resources to process meaning.” In the definition of fluency, there are three main skills that develop to achieve fluency as a gateway to achieve reading comprehension: accuracy, rate, and prosody.
Accuracy
At the forefront of the components of fluency is accuracy. Accuracy is not just the ability to read printed words correctly, but also understand their meaning. Before students can achieve accuracy, they must be taught the alphabetic principle, which sounds really fancy but is simply the spellings that represent the sounds of a language. When a students reads the word dog, they need to know that d represents /d/, o represents /o/, and g represents /g/, and this process needs to happen almost instantly and with little effort. Direct and systematic phonological awareness and phonics instruction are crucial to achieve this level of accuracy. Words need to be mapped and stored in the orthographic processor (sometimes referred to as the letter box) for automatic and accurate retrieval. The level of accuracy needed to is not possible for the majority of our students with memorization techniques and inexplicit teaching. Once a word, like dog, has been read, a student must also accurately attach the decoded word to meaning.
Without accuracy (and a high accuracy percentage at that), comprehension will undoubtably suffer.
If we look at the chart above, students reading at an 85% accuracy rate are missing too many words in a passage to actually understand what it is they are reading. We want to see students reading at AT LEAST 95% accuracy, if not higher. Why? Because comprehension suffers when they are any less accurate. We want students to be accurate so they understand. Our emerging readers who are still in the early stages of developing an understanding of the alphabetic principle and other key reading skills should aim for 97-98% accuracy (Hasbrouck, 2022). Accuracy itself is not enough to achieve deep comprehension, but without it we cannot develop any of the other components of fluent reading and we cannot achieve the overall goal of reading comprehension.
Looking for resources to help your students develop word level reading accuracy? Check out my “That’s My Space” game bundle! A fun and easy way to help students practice reading skill words and develop a large sight word bank.
Rate
Rate is often the first component thought of when thinking about or labeling a fluent reader- someone who reads quickly. Even the National Reading Panel, in their 2000 report on the essential components of reading, described fluent readers as “reading a text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression” (NRP, 2000, p. 3-1); however, Tim Shanahan, one of the members of the panel and one of the authors of that specific portion of the NRP, responded to this wording and explained why rate is critical in achieving fluency. Shanahan explained that word decoding on it’s own is not enough. Readers have to get to a point where their ability to recognize and read words is automatic to the point that it mimics spoken language.
Rate that mimics spoken language ebbs and flows, getting quicker at times and slowing down at others. If a student is reading for fun, we may expect and see that their reading rate is quicker compared to when they are reading an information text. Why? Because fast is not always better. In order to get a deep understanding and comprehend a text, rate will open get slower to focus on what is being read and that’s okay!
When assessing a students reading rate, one of the most accurate measures to use is an Oral Reading Fluency Assessment. This type of assessment has proven to be a highly accurate prediction on future reading success. As we assess students, we want them to score between the 50th and 75th percentile. There is sufficient evidence showing that students need to be reading at the 50th percentile in order to comprehend a text, but insufficient evidence showing that reading above the 75th percentile is beneficial to readers. In fact, reading too quickly can be just as detrimental to the comprehension of a text as reading too slow.
Prosody
One of the clearest marks of a fluent reader- expression. Without looking at an assessment or data, we can pick out the readers who are fluent by listening to the expression they use while reading. Prosody, or more frequently labeled reading with expression, is reading with a change in pitch, tone, and rhythm. It means the reading is phrasing, or grouping meaningful chunks of text together, and placing emphasis in the appropriate places. The verdict is still out on which comes first- prosody or comprehension. Margaret A. Groen, in an an article published in the Journal of Reading Research titled “The Role of Prosody in Reading Comprehension”, found that students who were average decoders but struggled with comprehension scored significantly lower than average readers and comprehends. This helps us to understand that word decoding accuracy and automaticity rates are not enough to link prosody to comprehension, but rather that sufficient text comprehension is the closer link to text prosody.
But that is a lot of research talk and I’m sure you’re thinking- “okay, so what?” What this means is that a lack of reading prosody is more so the result of insufficient skills in other places than a skill deficiency in reading with expression. My friend, Sarah, founder of Monkeypod Education said it best when she said “You can’t express what you don’t understand”. We cannot, however, become skilled, fluent readers without prosody.
Why Does Fluency Matter?
Now that we have an understanding of what fluency is and what skills work together in fluent reading, we get to the details of why it all matters. By creating fluent readers, we reduce the cognitive load on our brain while reading. Having to remember the letters, sounds, words, and meanings takes a lot of brain power! Bogged down brains have a harder time reaching deep comprehension. This is where fluency kicks in. If we can get those skills down and be able to recall them all effortlessly, our brain is ready for that deep dive into comprehension.
What also happens when we fail to reach proper fluency is the motivation to read is lower. This is not necessarily scientific, but most people who love to read are pretty good readers. The people who don’t like to read? They typically don’t consider themselves good readers. The goal is not to get everyone to love reading, and I am in no way saying that skilled readers always love to read; however, we want to give every student the opportunity to love reading if they want to and we do that by creating fluent readers.
Fluency is the gateway to using text to learn, grow, and enjoy. Without it, nothing else is possible and to gain it, we have to master various subskills first.
I’m sure your question now is “what does fluency instruction look like in the classroom?” and you’re in luck. My next blog post is all about how we can create fluent readers in the classroom.
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Sources
Geiger, Anna. “Fluency Isn’t Just about Speed: A Converstaion with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck.” Triple R Teaching, episode 97, https://www.themeasuredmom.com/reading-fluency-isnt-just-about-speed-a-conversation-with-dr-jan-hasbrouck/. Accessed Mar. 2023.
Shanahan, Timmothy. “Oral Reading Fluency Is More than Just Speed.” Shanahan on Literacy, 27 Oct. 2016, https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/oral-reading-fluency-is-more-than-speed. Accessed Mar. 2023.
“Dr. Jan Hasbrouck- Reading Fluency.” Youtube, Learning Difficulties Austrailia, 29 Apr. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGzQ97hh3lU. Accessed Mar. 2023.
Hasbrouck, Jan, and Gerald A Tindal. Oral Reading Fluency Norms: A Valuable Assessment Tools for Reading Teachers, 2006, pp. 636–644.
University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning. “Big Ideas in Beginning Reading.” Fluency: Concepts and Research, reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/flu/flu_what.php. Accessed 17 June 2023.
Hasbrouck, Jan, and Deborah Glaser. “Reading Fluently Does Not Mean Reading Fast.” International Literacy Association, 2018, www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-reading-fluently-does-not-mean-reading-fast.pdf.
“National Reading Panel Publications.” Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/der/branches/cdbb/nationalreadingpanelpubs. Accessed 17 June 2023.
Groen, Margriet A., et al. “The Role of Prosody in Reading Comprehension: Evidence from Poor Comprehenders.” Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 42, no. 1, 2018, pp. 37–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12133.d
