Why I Encourage Teaching Children to Read Disfluently 

by Tim Shanahan

Teacher question

Our school is trying to follow the science of reading. We are teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in Grades K-2 and assessing student progress in those skills throughout those grade levels. However, we don’t begin to assess or teach fluency until mid-first grade. Are we doing it right?

Shanahan response:

I think it’s okay to neglect fluency instruction until later in first grade, at least with most students. However, I suspect that you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to teach your students to read disfluently. I hope I can convince you to devote some of your instructional time to developing the kind of disfluency that research has identified as having an important role in early reading development. Once kids are sufficiently disfluent, it would be an appropriate time to start up the fluency teaching. (I've come to think of this work as the "roots of fluency."

First, let’s think about fluency instruction and why it matters.

The earliest explanation of fluency teaching that I ever encountered was written by Carol Chomsky (1978). Her concerns were with third graders who knew their phonics skills, but who were low in reading achievement. She focused on the idea of teaching these students to implement their decoding skills with text by having the kids read and reread the text.

And, it worked.

Research (National Reading Panel, 2000) has shown that various approaches to having students read and reread text aloud help students to read more proficiently (usually as measured by reading comprehension tests). But as you point out, the research record on such instruction doesn’t begin until later in Grade 1.

This kind of practice both helps kids to learn some of the words (Rashotte & Torgeson, 1985), and to apply and integrate the decoding skills that enable one to read and comprehend text.

However, there is another body of research.

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