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Dear Reader. Please read the following sentences out loud:
Behind the floral printed curtain, made of silk, a grey, chubby, furry cat slept contentedly. All of a sudden, she heard a caw, and to her surprise, a big, black crow was perched within reach. She glanced furtively, keeping a keen eye on the crow, calculating her approach. She leapt onto the railing at the speed of lightning, startling the bird, who cawed agitatedly, and flew away. “Oh, that was so close!” thought the cat, jumping back down dejectedly, resuming her sleeping posture behind the floral curtain.
How did you feel about your reading? Were you able to read the text fluently the first time? Reading a text fluently means to read it with accuracy, at an appropriate pace, with the correct phrasing and intonation. In this article, you will learn more about:-
what fluency is
why fluency is important
How to teach and improve fluency
Where to go to dive deeper into fluency
What is reading fluency?
When students are learning to read or decode text, they read slowly and haltingly. Sometimes they have to go back and reread words in order to pronounce them correctly. Sometimes they have to reread the whole sentence in order to get the phrasing correct. When this happens, we say that the reading is not fluent. When a reader reads text correctly, and with proper phrasing and intonation, we call this fluent reading.. The components of reading fluency are rate, accuracy, and prosody.. Imagine that you are reading the narrative about the cat above to young children - what rate would you read it at? What intonation would you give the words? These are all part of fluent reading.
To expand further, accuracy is defined as reading with minimal errors. Rate is the speed that comes with automaticity in reading. As students become more fluent in reading, their rate of reading increases.
Prosody is a qualitative measure of reading. It is what fluent readers use to convey a meaning when reading aloud. Prosody increases a reader’s access to meaning when he or she is reading aloud. It consists of a) expression, b) intonation, and c) phrasing. Expression is how our voice changes when we express emotions. Intonation is the variation in spoken pitch. For instance, our voice changes at the end when we pose a question. Phrasing, also known as chunking, is determined by the punctuation in a text.
Why is reading fluency important?
Reading fluency is sometimes thought of as the bridge between decoding and comprehension. It is what takes a student from learning to read to reading to learn. When a student can read accurately and at an appropriate pace, this facilitates an understanding of the content of the text.
Imagine a child who has difficulty decoding words. It would take them a longer time to read a paragraph than a child who decodes accurately. When it takes a longer time to read, more cognitive energy is being used in decoding, leaving less cognitive energy for understanding the text.
If the paragraph is long, sometimes students forget what happened at the beginning of the paragraph by the time they get to the end of it. This also diminishes comprehension. Reading fluency is thus important in enabling understanding of the material being read. You can see some examples of reading fluency in this video.
How to improve reading fluency
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