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Christine has an M.A. in American Studies. She is an instructional designer, educator, and writer with a particular interest in the social sciences and American studies.
Compare the following two passages:
I went to the store to buy a bunch of bananas. It took me several minutes to find ones that were not very green or very brown. I bought the green ones but got a bellyache from eating them before they were ripe.
This polyrhythmic piece differs from the irrational rhythms of the previous cantata, which made frequent use of tuplets. The hemiola was quite cacophonous and stridulant, if you ask me.
Reading the first passage, you probably felt quite fluent, recognizing all of the words automatically and comprehending their meaning in no time. What about the second passage? Unless you have training in music, you probably missed most of the meaning and had to slow down more than usual just to process the words in front of you.
Can you imagine reading pages and pages of information similar to the second passage of words you didn't recognize? This may help you get an idea for what a new reader may feel like when they first start decoding words, or taking the letters on the page and recognizing the actual word that's formed with those letters.
To make matters tougher for you, in our example, in addition to not recognizing the way the words are pronounced (although you probably could take a guess), you also likely didn't know the meanings of those words. While you usually think of yourself as a fluent reader, a tough passage affects this sense of fluency.
But what is reading fluency? Fluency refers to the ability to read quickly and with accuracy. When read out loud, fluency also includes the rhythm, intonation, and expressiveness that you hear from a reader. A fluent reader has prosody, which is the pace and rhythm that's appropriate for the text, including its punctuation and its meaning.
Your level of fluency is impacted by the text you're reading. So a first grade student may be quite fluent in reading first-grade material, but not fluent at all in reading sixth grade material. You may be fluent when reading a passage related to produce in the grocery store, but find you are less fluent in a technical passage about music.
Here's a word that might pause you in your reading if you haven't seen it before: automaticity, which is the ability to recognize individual letters and words automatically. When it takes you a long time to decode a letter or word, your pace of reading and comprehension of what you're reading suffers.
Basic decoding involves being able to sound out words, while automatic word recognition means you don't have to put so much focus and attention on identifying the word. Researchers have found that this frees up time and energy as you read to focus on what all of these words mean when you put them together.
So how do teachers help students improve fluency and automaticity? In the May 2005 edition of The Reading Teacher, Special Education professors Roxanne F. Hudson, Holly B. Lane, and Paige C. Pullen recommended the strategy of repeated readings in an article entitled ''Reading Fluency Assessment and Instruction: What, Why, and How?''. This technique involves multiple readings of the same text and can be done as a timed activity. The goal is for the student to improve her or his accuracy and speed.
Rather than simply having students reread a passage for a particular number of times, ideally the student is aiming for a particular level of improvement. So, the student's timing and accuracy is measured initially, such as by counting the number of accurate words read per minute. Then a goal is set for how much the student will aim to improve during the course of the activity.
The article points out that there are many variations on this exercise, including such creative options as performing a text for others in the class after practicing it, recording a student reading aloud, and having the student read along to a pre-recording of the text.
Repeated readings can start with sheets of individual letter sounds, rather than passages of text. Next, students can work on letter combinations (such as ''ing'' or ''ph''). Then the student can do multiple readings of full words, and finally, text that includes sentences.
Hudson, Lane, and Pullen highlight another technique known as phrase boundaries where slashes are used to help students know where to chunk bits of text, improving their prosody. For example:
I like the bananas / when they are yellow / but I don't mind / a bit of brown.
In addition, other researchers have recommended building the number of sight words that are recognizable to students. Sight words are common words that teachers can help students to memorize through activities and drills.
Let's recap. Improving reading fluency and automaticity frees up students to focus more on comprehending the meaning of what they're reading. Reading fluency involves accuracy, speed, and prosody. In addition, automaticity refers to the ability to automatically recognize letters and words and supports students to read more quickly and easily.
Some key strategies to improve fluency include repeated readings, in which students read the same text multiple times, and sight words memorization, as well as efforts to improve vocabulary.
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MTLE Elementary Education: Practice & Study Guide34 chapters | 243 lessons | 25 flashcard sets
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