Teaching Reading Fluency - FAQs

Tim Shanahan

Blast from the Past: This blog entry first appeared on September 29, 2009 and was reposted on July 27, 2024. Usually, I repost a blog when I get a bunch of questions on a topic that I’ve previously written about or when there is some public event that renews its relevance. This is something completely different. It has been quite a while since anyone has asked any questions about fluency instruction. One might assume that means fluency is now being widely and well taught in schools. I have reason to believe that not to be the case. I suspect that with all the current “science of reading” promotion of phonics instruction and the commensurate push back against that on behalf of reading comprehension, that fluency instruction is the last thing on many teachers’ minds. Years ago, Dick Allington called out teachers for neglecting fluency, and we might again be in that situation. I’ve been wanting to write about fluency again for some time, so I decided to update and repost this blog entry. Hope it is a helpful reminder about something very important.

Here is an FAQ on teaching oral reading fluency:

Do all students need work with fluency? 

For the most part, yes. However, fluency is a relatively constrained reading skill. That means students eventually reach a peak level of fluency, at which point instruction can be discontinued. The higher the grade level you teach, the more likely you’ll have some students who won’t need any additional fluency instruction. If you teach in the elementary grades, it is not likely that you’ll have many students who can read high school level texts with high accuracy, and a reading speed of 150-175 words per minute. If you do, those kids can skip the fluency practice.

What is the point of fluency instruction?

The earliest thinking on fluency came from Carol Chomsky. Her notion was that students who had learned decoding, needed to learn how to implement this knowledge when reading text. This argues for providing both explicit phonics instruction, along with fluency practice. Jay Samuels believed that the point of this instruction was to develop automaticity – the ability to carry out a task successfully without conscious attention, which led to his recommendation for repeated reading, since repetition can lead to that level of proficiency. Later, Joe Torgesen, who was looking at fluency with younger readers and lower performing readers, concluded that the students were mainly memorizing particular words, so he argued for the use of texts with lots of vocabulary repetition across texts. Other scholars have noted the important role that fluency practice plays in the development of prosody or expression – meaning that once student can read the words in text successfully they must make it sound like text, which is entirely a comprehension issue. 

What kinds of teaching improves fluency?

The National Reading Panel concluded that oral reading practice with feedback and repetition was valuable in developing fluency. Providing some kind of guidance in how to parse or chunk sentences – where to pause when reading so the words are grouped appropriately is beneficial, too. 

Our students are getting low scores in reading comprehension. Why aren’t we focusing on that instead of fluency?

Low comprehension scores can mean many things. Perhaps, they signal problems with language (e.g., lousy vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, discourse structure), limited prior knowledge, or just a lack of ability to focus on the right kinds of information. If kids do have those problems, then fluency work is not likely to help. But quite often, the reason for low comprehension is that the students can’t read the text well. In other words, if you want higher comprehension, fluency work can be a powerful road to get there.

How much fluency teaching are we expected to provide?

READ MORE...