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Focus: With teaching special education, many of my students are reading well below grade level. I plan on researching different interventions that will better increase my students' oral reading fluency. 

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Focus: With teaching special education, many of my students are reading well below grade level. I plan on researching different interventions that will better increase my students' oral reading fluency. 

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Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students

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Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students

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Fluency Components
1. Accuracy
2. Automaticity
3. Expression

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Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students

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Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students

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Gunning (2016) stated, "Reading at an appropriate rate in meaningful phrases, with prosody and comprehension, should be the fluency goal for all readers" (p. 224).

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This website also provides interventions and hands-on activities for reading fluency. It divides these activities by grade band.

http://www.fcrr.org/resources/resources_sca_2-3.html

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Reading fluency assessment andinstruction: What, why, and how?

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Reading fluency assessment andinstruction: What, why, and how?

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This article describes the importance of fluency and how to assess it. It goes into detail about the different components of fluency. It describes Read Naturally for Repeated Reading. Also describes how Reader's Theater is important.

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1: What all encompasses reading fluency?

2: What are the best fluency strategies to help support students with Learning Disabilities?

3: What contributes to making a fluent reader?

4: In what ways should fluency be measured? Appropriate assessments for elementary students.

5: How can teachers support a student's development in fluency?

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This website describes the three dimensions of Fluency and how to assess it. It provides a thorough rubric for each section.

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Fifth grade has turned into a difficult year for Jonah. He is a bright student, but he has difficulty reading. Although he can accurately sound out the words he encounters, he plods along word-by-word, often hesitating at challenging vocabulary. His oral reading shows little attention to punctuation and phrasing, and it lacks expression and enthusiasm. Jonah can, however, understand material read to him. His difficulty seems to lie somewhere on the path from decoding to comprehension-in reading fluency.

Since the publication of the National Reading Panel report (2000) and other recent scholarly reviews of scientific research (Chard, Vaughn, & Tyler, 2002; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; Rasinski & Hoffman, 2003), reading fluency has taken a front seat in discussions about student reading success and effective instruction in reading. Yet programs and materials addressing reading instruction and teacher training seldom tackle reading fluency (Rasinski & Zutell, 1996). This lack may be due to the fact that fluency has long been associated with oral reading, a form of reading traditionally viewed as having little importance in learning to read (Gibson & Levin, 1975; Smith, 2002).

Three Dimensions of Reading Fluency

Defining reading fluency may help clarify the issue. Successful reading requires readers to process the text (the surface level of reading) and comprehend the text (the deeper meaning). Reading fluency refers to the reader's ability to develop control over surface-level text processing so that he or she can focus on understanding the deeper levels of meaning embedded in the text.

Reading fluency has three important dimensions that build a bridge to comprehension. The first dimension is accuracy in word decoding. Readers must be able to sound out the words in a text with minimal errors. In terms of skills, this dimension refers to phonics and other strategies for decoding words. The second dimension is automatic processing. Readers need to expend as little mental effort as possible in the decoding aspect of reading so that they can use their finite cognitive resources for meaning making (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). The third dimension is what linguists call prosodic reading (Schreiber, 1980, 1991; Schreiber & Read, 1980). The reader must parse the text into syntactically and semantically appropriate units. If readers read quickly and accurately but with no expression in their voices, if they place equal emphasis on every word and have no sense of phrasing, and if they ignore most punctuation, blowing through periods and other markers that indicate pauses, then it is unlikely that they will fully understand the text.

Assessing Reading Fluency

Teachers can easily assess each of the three dimensions of reading fluency. To determine proficiency in decoding connected text, calculate the percentage of words a reader can accurately decode on grade-level material. An accuracy level of 90-95 percent is usually considered adequate. Thus, a 3rd grader who is progressing normally in decoding accuracy should be able to read a 100-word text written at a 3rd grade level with no more than 10 uncorrected decoding errors. More than 10 uncorrected errors per 100 words indicates that decoding is a concern, one that requires additional instruction and practice.

Teachers can normally assess automaticity in decoding by looking at the student's reading rate. Reading rates increase as students mature, so the target reading rate increases as students move through school. An easy method for determining reading rate, and thus automaticity, involves having students orally read a grade-level passage for 60 seconds and then calculating the number of words read correctly (corrected errors count as words read correctly) (Deno, 1985). Compare students' scores with target rates (oral fluency norms) for each grade level (Rasinski, 2003). Readers who fall 20-30 percent below the target rate will normally require additional instruction.

The best way to assess prosodic reading is to listen to a student read a grade-level passage and to then judge the quality of the reading using a rubric that scores a student on the elements of expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace (see fig. 1, p. 49). Students who score poorly may be considered at risk in this dimension of reading fluency.
Figure 1. Multidimensional Fluency Scale
Figure 1. Multidimensional Fluency Scale

By having students read one or two grade-level passages for one minute each, teachers can get a quick sense of their students' level of decoding accuracy, automaticity, and prosodic reading. Although such quick assessments may not be definitive, they do provide teachers and school administrators with a method for screening new students, tracking students' ongoing progress in the various dimensions of reading fluency, and identifying the students who may require additional assessment and instruction.

Teaching Reading Fluency

Instruction in reading fluency depends on the area in which students require the most help. Students with difficulties in accuracy require instruction in learning how to decode words. Although teachers are familiar with this kind of instruction, which develops skills in phonics and decoding, they may not be as familiar with methods for developing students' strength in automaticity and prosodic reading.

In my own instructional efforts to develop automaticity and prosodic reading, I use assisted readings and repeated readings, two methods that research has shown to improve reading fluency (Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000; Rasinski & Hoffman, 2003). Students need to hear what fluent reading sounds like and how fluent readers interpret text with their voices.

Hearing fluent reading, however, is not the same as being a fluent reader. Fortunately, assisted readings can help. After reading a passage aloud to students, I ask them to follow along with me, first silently and then aloud, as a group. Sometimes I ask students to orally read a passage with a partner who is at the same reading level. At other times, I ask more fluent readers to read with students who are having difficulty with reading (Eldredge & Quinn, 1988; Topping, 1987a, 1987b, 1995) or I have students silently read while listening to a fluent rendering of the passage on tape (Carbo, 1978; Pluck, 1995). Such practices constitute a powerful strategy for improving fluency and comprehension.

Developing fluency in reading requires practice; this is where the method of repeated readings comes in (Samuels, 1979). Research indicates that repeated readings lead not only to improvement in reading the passage but also to improvement in decoding, reading rate, prosodic reading, and comprehension of passages that the reader has not previously seen (Dowhower, 1994; Koskinen & Blum, 1986; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000).

Passages meant to be read aloud as a performance-poetry, for example, or scripts, speeches, monologues, dialogues, jokes, and riddles-are perfect texts for developing fluency. I see many teachers converting their classrooms into poetry cafés and readers' theater festivals on Friday afternoons to give students the opportunity to perform the assigned texts that they have diligently practiced during the week.

The teacher plays a key role in developing prosodic reading skills by modeling prosodic reading in classroom read-aloud sessions and then discussing the specific oral interpretation that he or she chose. Coaching provides another opportunity for developing these skills by making students aware of their own interpretation of the text and moving readers toward deeper levels of interpretation and meaning.

Here are some comments I have heard teachers make while coaching students in oral interpretation.

"You got all the words right, Thomas, but you read too fast. It was hard for me to follow what you were trying to tell me."

"Eliza, the way you made each character sound different in this dialogue was fantastic. It was easy and fun to listen to these characters arguing."

"I really like how you paused between sentences. This gave me a chance to think about the author's message. Now think about finding places to pause for just a second more inside longer sentences."

"I loved how you made your voice strong and loud in this section. It really told me that this section of the passage was important."

"Try slowing down here and making your voice a bit softer. Remember, you're trying to tell me about something mysterious. Tell the story with your voice as well as with the words."

As assisted and repeated reading, coupled with coaching, become part of the classroom routine, teachers can track changes in students' accuracy, reading rate, and prosodic reading. Jonah, our struggling 5th grade reader, originally read a 4th grade-level passage at 60 words correct per minute and a 5th grade-level passage at 52 words correct per minute. A 5th grader, however, should be reading approximately 100-125 words correct per minute during the first half of the school year. After just two months of working in small groups with a reading teacher for three 40-minute sessions each week, Jonah's reading rate on 5th grade-level passages increased to 84 words correct per minute. His accuracy, prosodic reading, and comprehension improved as well.

Several instructional routines for developing reading fluency show promise for improving reading in all readers. Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (Stahl & Heubach, in press) has students engage in modeled, repeated, and assisted reading of passages from basal readers. The Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, Padak, Linek, & Sturtevant, 1994) uses poetry, monologues, dialogues, speeches, and other performance texts to promote reading fluency. Fast Start (Rasinski, 1995; Stevenson, 2002) promotes early reading fluency through parental involvement.

Confusing Fast with Fluent

The new focus on reading fluency has great potential for improving the reading achievement of all students, particularly those who have not met with great success in reading. I am, however, concerned about how some schools define reading fluency and how some teachers teach it. In some schools, where improvement of the reading rate has become the chief goal of fluency instruction, teachers admonish students to "pick up the pace," regularly time them on their reading to encourage them to beat their previous scores, and engage students in daily reading exercises that emphasize speed over meaning.

This is a corruption of the concept of reading fluency. If we emphasize speed at the expense of prosodic and meaningful reading, we will end up with fast readers who understand little of what they have read. Fluency instruction leads to impressive gains when it provides regular opportunities for expressive reading through assisted and repeated readings coupled with coaching; it doesn't require explicit reference to reading for speed. Students' reading rates will improve as they become naturally more efficient and confident in their ability to decode words.

Fluency Into the Future

Research (Pinnell et al., 1995) suggests that reading fluency is a crucial factor among 4th grade students, but it can also be an important issue beyond the elementary grades. I recently worked with a group of colleagues from Kent State University to examine the fluency of high school students in an urban setting. We found that variations in the reading fluency of these students accounted for approximately 30 percent of the variance in their performance on Ohio's High School Graduation Test. Clearly, this finding suggests that fluency may be an issue that goes well into the high school years, especially among students from less advantaged backgrounds.

If teachers and school leaders are truly committed to leaving no child behind in reading, then they must actively pursue the goal of reading fluency in elementary and middle school classrooms. Existing scientific research on reading fluency indicates that it is an important factor in reading education and thus should be part of any comprehensive and effective reading curriculum.

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Fifth grade has turned into a difficult year for Jonah. He is a bright student, but he has difficulty reading. Although he can accurately sound out the words he encounters, he plods along word-by-word, often hesitating at challenging vocabulary. His oral reading shows little attention to punctuation

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Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students

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Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students

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Instruction Strategies that Gunning (2016) provides:
- Choral Reading
-Paired Reading
-Repeated Reading
-Record-Book Method
-Fluency Read-Alongs
-Alternative Reading

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This website provides nterventions for the various areas of reading. There are quite a few that are for building sight word knowledge. Intervention Central also has nine specific interventions for direct reading fluency.
http://www.interventioncentral.org/response-to-intervention

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This section of a journal describes the importance of fluency. It also discusses how fluency is a building block for other reading skills. Ways to help students include: Modeling, Assisted Reading, Technology, Repeated Practice, Rehearsal, Appropriate Text Selections

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Fluency: A Necessary Ingredient in Comprehensive Reading Instruction in Inclusive Classrooms

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Fluency: A Necessary Ingredient in Comprehensive Reading Instruction in Inclusive Classrooms

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Important points:
1. Explicit Instruction
2. Offers wide-web resources for students and teachers.
3. Repeated Reading, Reader's Theater, Paired Reading, Choral Reading

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Paired Reading and Related Methods for Improving Fluency

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Paired Reading and Related Methods for Improving Fluency

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This is an article from a journal. It describes Paired Reading, its benefits, a study describing its effects, and much more. Paired Reading is discussed how it helps increase a students' oral reading fluency.

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Effect on Reading Fluency of Struggling Third Grade Students: Computer-Assisted Intervention versus Teacher-Guided Intervention

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Effect on Reading Fluency of Struggling Third Grade Students: Computer-Assisted Intervention versus Teacher-Guided Intervention

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This was a study done based on two different fluency programs.I found this study interesting because my district has recently started using Read Naturally (computer-assisted). Both programs involve repeated reading, but the teacher-guided intervention included more paired reading.

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I learned about Read Naturally through another website while researching. This website describes the program  and different ways to model fluency such as:

Teacher-assisted reading

Peer-assisted reading

Audio-assisted reading

It describes repeated reading and how to progress monitor.

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What Is Fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read "like you speak." Hudson, Lane, and Pullen define fluency this way: "Reading fluency is made up of at least three key elements: accurate reading of connected text at a conversational rate with appropriate prosody or expression." Non-fluent readers suffer in at least one of these aspects of reading: they make many mistakes, they read slowly, or they don't read with appropriate expression and phrasing.

​ Developing reading fluency with Read Naturally Strategy programs

Key Concepts

Why Is Fluency Important?

For many years, educators have recognized that fluency is an important aspect of reading. Reading researchers agree. Over 30 years of research indicates that fluency is one of the critical building blocks of reading, because fluency development is directly related to comprehension.

Here are the results of one study by Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, and Jenkins that shows how oral reading fluency correlates highly with reading comprehension.

To interpret this type of correlation data, consider that a perfect match would be 1.0. As you can see, oral recall/retelling, fill in the blank, and question answering are all above 0.6, which indicates there is a strong correlation. But oral reading fluency is by far the strongest, with a .91 correlation.

Many researchers, including Breznitz, Armstrong, Knupp, Lesgold, and Pinnell, have found that fluency is highly correlated with reading comprehension-that is, when a student reads fluently, that student is likely to comprehend what he or she is reading.

Why are reading fluency and reading comprehension so highly correlated? Dr. S. Jay Samuels, a professor and researcher well known for his work in fluency, put forth a theory called the automaticity theory. According to Dr. Samuels, people have a limited amount of mental energy. If you want to multitask or to become proficient at a complex task such as reading, you first need to master the component tasks so you can do them automatically. For example, a reader who must focus his or her attention on decoding words may not have enough mental energy left over to think about the meaning of the text. However, a fluent reader who can automatically decode the words can instead give full attention to comprehending the text. To become proficient readers, our students need to become automatic with text so they can pay attention to the meaning.

See also:

Challenges Faced by Non-Fluent Readers

Students become fluent by reading. Some students learn to read fluently without explicit instruction. For others, however, fluency doesn't develop in the course of normal classroom instruction.

Research analyzed by the National Reading Panel suggests that just encouraging students to read independently isn't the most effective way to improve reading achievement. Too often, simply encouraging at-risk students to read doesn't result in increased reading on their part. During sustained silent reading, at-risk readers may get a book with mostly pictures and look at the pictures, or they choose a difficult book so they will look like everyone else and then pretend to read.

Even if at-risk students do read, they read more slowly than the other students. In a 10-minute reading period, a proficient reader who reads 200 words a minute silently could read 2,000 words. In the same 10 minutes, an at-risk student who reads 50 words a minute would only read 500 words. This is equal reading time but certainly not an equal number of words read.

These students need to read more, but just asking them to read on their own often doesn't work. The National Reading Panel has concluded that a more effective course of action is for us to explicitly teach developing readers how to read fluently, step by step.

Research-Proven Fluency Strategies

How do we explicitly teach students to read fluently? The National Reading Panel found data supporting three strategies that improve fluency, comprehension, and reading achievement-teacher modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring.

Teacher Modeling

The first strategy is teacher modeling. Research demonstrates that various forms of modeling can improve reading fluency. Examples of teacher modeling include:

Teacher-assisted reading

Peer-assisted reading

Audio-assisted reading

Teacher modeling involves more than just listening to someone else read. Students must be actively involved 100 percent of the time and in a multisensory way.

Teacher modeling teaches word recognition in a meaningful context, demonstrates correct phrasing, and gives students practice tracking across the page. A child can benefit from teacher modeling once he or she knows at least 50 sight words and has a good sense of beginning sounds.

The reading rate of the model reader is important. Christopher Skinner, a reading researcher, found that students who read lists of words with him slowly were more fluent with the words than students who read with him at a faster rate. The slower rate enables students to learn new words and clarify difficult words. As students learn more words, they naturally become more fluent.

Another form of modeling is the neurological impress method. In the neurological impress method, a proficient and a struggling reader read together from a passage, with the more able reader reading near the rate of the struggling reader. Heckelman (1969) showed that after 29 15-minute sessions, 24 seventh- through ninth-grade boys, who were an average of 3 years behind in reading, gained an average of 1.9 years in reading based on the Oral Gilmore and the California Achievement Test.

Repeated Reading

Another technique that research has shown significantly builds reading fluency is repeated reading. In fact, the National Reading Panel says this is the most powerful way to improve reading fluency. This involves simply reading the same material over and over again until accurate and expressive.

In the 1970s, LaBerge and Samuels studied what happens when students read passages over and over again. They found that when students reread passages, they got faster at reading the passages, understood them better, and were able to read subsequent passages better as a result of the repeated reading.

Repeated reading is a form of mastery learning. The students read the same words so many times that they begin to know them and are able to identify them in other text. Besides helping students bring words to mastery, repeated reading changes the way students view themselves in relation to the act of reading.

Progress Monitoring

People who play video games are presented with a specific goal and with immediate, relevant feedback about their progress toward that goal. This combination of having a goal and getting feedback on progress can be very motivating.

Progress monitoring takes advantage of this combination to motivate students to read. You give students a specific, individual reading goal, and you tell them exactly how you're going to know they've met it. Then, you give them the means to measure how they're doing. Finally, you make it simple enough that they'll know they've met their goal even before you do. This progress monitoring is what motivates students to practice reading the same story over and over until achieving mastery.

​Developing Reading Fluency With Read Naturally Strategy Programs

The research-based Read Naturally Strategy combines these three strategies into highly effective programs that accelerate reading achievement. Students become confident readers by developing fluency, phonics skills, comprehension, and vocabulary while reading leveled text. The time-tested intervention programs engage students with interesting nonfiction stories and yield powerful results.

Learn more about the Read Naturally Strategy
Research basis for the Read Naturally Strategy

The Read Naturally Strategy is available in a variety of formats:

Choosing the right Read Naturally Strategy program

One Minute Reader®
Structured, supplemental reading program for developing literacy skills independently. Available in these formats:
One Minute Reader Live (component of web-based Read Live for supplemental reading at school)
One Minute Reader books/audio CDs (for a school-to-home checkout program)

Bibliography

Armstrong, S. W. (1983). The effects of material difficulty upon learning disabled children's oral reading and reading comprehension. Learning Disability Quarterly, 6, pp. 339-348.

Breznitz, Z. (1987). Increasing first graders' reading accuracy and comprehension by accelerating their reading rates. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(3), pp. 236-242.

Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., Hosp, M. K., & Jenkins, J. R. (2001). Oral reading fluency as an indicator of reading competence: A theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), pp. 239-256.

Heckelman, R. G. (1969). A neurological-impress method of remedial-reading instruction. Academic Therapy Quarterly, 5(4), pp. 277-282.

Hudson, R. F., H. B. Lane, and P. C. Pullen. (2005). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how. Reading Teacher 58(8), pp. 702-714.

Knupp, R. (1988). Improving oral reading skills of educationally handicapped elementary school-aged students through repeated readings. Practicum paper, Nova University (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 297275).

LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6, pp. 292-323.

Lesgold, A., Resnick, L. B., & Hammond, K. (1985). Learning to read: A longitudinal study of word skill development in two curricula. In G. Waller & E. MacKinon (eds.), Reading research: Advances in theory and practice. New York, NY: Academic Press.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Pinnell, G. S., Pikulski, J. J., Wixson, K. K., Campbell, J. R., Gough, P. B., & Beatty, A. S. (1995). Listening to children read aloud: Data from NAEP's integrated reading performance record (IRPR) at grade 4 (NCES Publication 95-726). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics.

Samuels, S. J. (2002). Reading fluency: Its development and assessment. In A. E. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction, 3rd ed., pp. 166-183. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Samuels, S. J. (1997). The method of repeated readings. The Reading Teacher, 50(5), pp. 376-381.

Samuels, S. J. (2006). Towards a model of reading fluency. In S. J. Samuels and A. E. Farstrup (eds.), What research has to say about fluency instruction. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Samuels, S. J. (1997). The method of repeated readings. The Reading Teacher, 50(5), pp. 376-381.

Skinner, C. H., Logan, P., Robinson, S. L., & Robinson, D. H. (1997). Demonstration as a reading intervention for exceptional learners. School Psychology Review, 26(3), pp. 437-447.

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What is fluency? Reading at a conversational rate with accuracy and expression. Why is fluency important? Fluency directly correlates to comprehension.

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1: Repeated Reading

2: The use of technology is beneficial to students to assist in fluency.

3: All components of fluency need to be addressed.

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I created this matrix to break down four foundational skills relating to reading fluency for my third grade students.

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Growing Reading Fluency: Engaging Readers with Technology and Text

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Growing Reading Fluency: Engaging Readers with Technology and Text

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This article discusses several pedagogical strategies for technology integration that support reading fluency. It provides websites and different strategies (Reader's Theater/Repeated Reading) for teachers to use to help students become aware of their  fluency.

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Alternative Text Types to Improve Reading Fluency for Competent to Struggling Readers:

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Alternative Text Types to Improve Reading Fluency for Competent to Struggling Readers:

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This article was wonderful in explaining the different areas of fluency and the skills a fluent reader must have. This article suggest that the secret to teach reading fluency is within the texts we use (rhyming, poetry, repeated reading)