Fluency

"Fluency is the ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression" Classrooms That Work (49).

As we learned this week, fluency is an important component of literacy. Without fluency it is difficult to comprehend texts and gain a better understanding through reading. It is important to model fluent and expressive reading through echo reading and choral reading so that you can excite your students about reading well.

One of the biggest factors of fluency is recognition, which is why a high-frequency word wall is suggested. It is important to do a word wall...not just have one. In order to do a word wall our text suggests:

• Be selective about the words you choose, limiting it to the most common words
• Add words gradually (only 5 or 6 a week)
• Make the words easily accessible where everyone can see them
• Practice, Practice, Practice! Chant and write the words with your students often
• Do a variety of activities so that your students can read and spell the words automatically 

You can make your word wall interesting with different colors and hanging it from the ceiling.

For younger grades, you can make a word wall center so students can practice spelling these words with magnets.

In order to truly understand how to instruct and assess fluency, we must have a good working definition of the components of fluency. Deeney tells us in his article,

Fluency consists of four components: 
Accuracy (freedom from word-identification problems)
Rate or Speed (automaticity, without hesitation)
Prosody (smoothly)
Comprehension

It is also important to note that one-minute assessments do not assess all four categories of fluency. Instead, they only assess Accuracy and Rate (and it can measure endurance if you have them read for longer). While it is useful to gather this information, it is important not to measure overall fluency using just these assessments.

Deeny offers a few instructional methods to improve fluency:

• Increase automaticity (like using the word wall)
• Decrease readability levels (to increase endurance, students must read texts they can already read fluently)
• Read texts that are interesting to them
• Increase reading volume
• Reread books
• Engage parents

Making it fun will make students excited to read well.

Rasinski also tells us how to "create fluent readers" in his article. He emphasizes that students who have many uncorrected words in their assessment probably need more instruction on decoding words and phonics skills. However those who need to strengthen their automaticity and prosodic reading would benefit from assisted reading and repeated reading. He suggests that the best passages for repeated read aloud reading includes: poetry, scripts, speeches, jokes, monologues, and dialogues. Be careful though! Make sure your students (and you) do not confuse reading fast with reading fluently. If a student can read a high number of words per minute but without prosodic and comprehensive reading, then they have not achieved fluency.

Question for the readers: Do you think that assessing fluency is this often is too much? Many schools assess fluency weekly, and even have students keep personal charts of their improvements. Do you think this is a good practice? Do you think there is a better way to assess fluency?