Fluency

About Fluency

What is it?

Fluency is defined as the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. In order to understand what they read, children must be able to read fluently whether they are reading aloud or silently. When reading aloud, fluent readers read in phrases and add intonation appropriately. Their reading is smooth and has expression.

Accuracy, automaticity and prosody are important components with fluency.

Accuracy: making few errors when reading
- Readers are frustrated if reading with less that 93% accuracy
- Readers are independent if reading with greater than 97% accuracy
- Readers are at an instructional level if reading with 93-97% accuracy. The instructional level is where intervention should take place.
Automaticity: reading at an automatic rate with the ability to recognize and read words quickly
Prosody: expression or the intonation, stress, tempo and appropriate phrasing

If you need to determine the accuracy level of the text for the student, divide the number of words correctly by the total number of words read and multiply by 100.

https://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/fluency#:~:text=Fluency%20is%20defined%20as%20the,phrases%20and%20add%20intonation%20appropriately.

https://dibels.uoregon.edu/training/bir/accuracy-and-fluency.php

https://presscommunity.org

Why is it important?

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. Fluency bridges the gap between word recognition and comprehension because the reader is not focused on decoding and can instead focus on meaning of the text. An important note is that fluent reading does not mean comprehension is occurring, but fluent reading is an important step towards achieving comprehension.

Fluency progresses in the following stages:

Word by word
Two word phrases with some three and four word groupings
Three or four word phrase groups with little expression
Larger meaningful phrase groups with expression

https://www.readnaturally.com/research/5-components-of-reading/fluency

https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading-basics/fluency

How is it assessed?

Fluency is assessed by having the student read words or a passage for a pre-determined amount of time, typically one minute. A student is asked to read material while the examiner tracks the number of errors committed during the timing. If the examiner chooses to have the student read for more than one minute, the following formula should be used to determine the number of correct words read per minute.

Multiply the total number of words read correctly by 60; divide that by the number of seconds to read the passage

Fluency should be assessed both at the instructional level of the student as well as the grade level. The assessment can take place on alternate weeks.