Improve Reading Achievement Through These 12 Benefits of Fluency Instruction
The better students can read orally, the more deeply they understand and enjoy what they read. This is because they have bridged meaning with automatic word recognition to develop fluency, which has allowed for a far deeper text connection to occur.
Reading fluency is a critical goal for reading success. Yet the approaches for teaching fluent reading are often missing supporting text or practical application exemplars. Poetry, songs, jokes, movie scripts, television scripts, famous speeches, and other such texts beg for expressive reading. Having students perform these develops fluency and brings deeper comprehension.
The research of the past two decades demonstrates a robust correlation between automatic word recognition and expressive oral reading and silent reading comprehension. That is, students who practice reading orally with good expression are more likely to comprehend deeply when reading silently.
Students who are unable to develop fluency will likely have difficulty achieving necessary levels of comprehension when reading. Because fluency is a foundational competency, difficulties in fluency can also lead to later difficulties in content areas that rely heavily on reading.
Effective fluency instruction is essential to improving the overall reading achievement of all students, as well as to boosting their achievement in other content areas. That's what The Megabook of Fluency is all about. In our book, we offer more than 50 ready-to-use strategies to develop fluency in your classroom, plus 200 supporting student pages in a format that helps you find the material quickly and easily so that all the readers in your classroom can benefit from fluency instruction.
The top 12 benefits of authentic fluency instruction and activities are:
1. Improves word recognition accuracy.
2. Improves automatic word recognition.
3. Improves oral (and silent) reading expression.
4. Improves reading comprehension and overall reading proficiency.
5. Allows reading to be a joyful act through performance of texts.
6. Provides an authentic reason for repeated reading (rehearsal).
7. Improves students' self-confidence as readers.
8. Allows even struggling readers to become reading stars.
9. Expands the variety of reading available for students.
10. Unifies all types of learners in a community experience.
11. Increases reading time at school.
12. Can become a great home-school connection.
We have created a book that promotes fluency to help you create students who use fluency for its intended purpose: to read meaningfully and with deep comprehension.
About the authors of this post:
Timothy V. Rasinski, professor of literacy education at Kent State University, began his career as a classroom teacher. He has written and edited more than 50 books and 200 articles on reading education, including the seminal The Fluent Reader.
Melissa Cheesman Smith is an author of professional books and teacher at the elementary and college level, with a Master’s of Education in Curriculum and Instruction.