| "With greater fluency, readers can concentrate on comprehending what they read, develop greater self-confidence, and enjoy reading more." (Gillet and Temple, 1994)
What Is Fluency? Rapid, accurate, prosodic reading of connected text is called fluency. To determine a child's reading fluency, you must know the rate (words per minute) and accuracy (number of words correctly identified) with which the child performs reading tasks. Fluent readers read quickly, in meaningful chunks, with a high level of accuracy. They "hear" the correct phrasing, rhythm, and expression of a sentence. Fluency is a critical component of skilled reading.
What Role Does Fluency Play? Fluency frees readers to understand what they are reading. Proficient readers read with automaticity—or the ability to accurately and quickly decode many words as whole units (Blevins, 2001). Automaticity is a precursor to fluency, but the two skills are not the same (National Reading Panel, 2000). Automaticity involves word recognition; fluency involves the ability to read passages accurately, with the correct rhythm and expression, and with ease. Fluent readers know how to group individual words into meaningful phrases, thereby making mental connections and gaining knowledge as they read. They often read more, thus encountering and learning new words at a faster rate than less-skilled readers. Struggling readers who lack fluency read slowly, one word at a time. They are so focused on decoding individual words that they have little attention left for comprehending a text.
How Does Fluency Develop? In the past, direct teaching of fluency was reserved for children who did not develop reading fluency by 3rd grade (Rasinski, 1989). Today researchers know that fluency takes time and repeated practice to develop (National Reading Panel, 2000). Reading fluency is the product of strong and accurate foundational reading skills in such areas as phonemic awareness and letter recognition (Wolf and Katzir-Cohen, 2001). Once these skills are fully developed, reading fluency can happen—where decoding is effortless, reading is smooth and accurate with correct prosody, and comprehension is occurring.
A Basic Formula for Fluency:
Rapid phonemic awareness + rapid letter recognition --> automatic decoding --> fluent passage reading = comprehension
Special Education Focus: Instructional Goals for Special Education
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Poor readers need to work on "lower level" skills in order to improve their accuracy in speech-sound awareness, sound-symbol association, and sound blending; their reading decodable text, and their recognition of sight words. Fluency is important for these children as well as those who are more advanced. Appropriate goals include:
- 95% to 100% accuracy and satisfactory speed on essential skills such as writing sight words or pronouncing letter-sounds.
- daily reading in decodable text, with attention to increasing speed and phrasing.
- daily practice summarizing information that is read by or read to the child.
During partner activities, including activities that focus on letter-sound relationships, pair poor readers with readers who will model proficiently. | 
