Nessy

“Fluency is the ability to read a text with accuracy, automaticity, and prosody (expression) sufficiently enough to enable comprehension. Fluency is a key skill to becoming a strong reader because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.” 

-Definition by Reading Rockets. 

Clara Maria Fiorentini is an Initial Teacher Education and Early Childhood Education lecturer at Marino Institute for Education. Before this, she taught in an urban DEIS primary school in Co. Dublin, Ireland, for eleven years.

See Clara’s top tips below for helping struggling readers gain fluency with text and lay the foundations for becoming strong readers.

Fluency Tips for Home and School

With fluency, a one-size-fits-all approach will not best serve our readers. Are you concerned about fluency progress? Pause and reflect. Then take action! Spend less time getting caught up on where you think the children ‘should be’ - meet your students where they are and work back from there…find the missing links. Slow down to catch up.    

What to do:

• Model expressive reading consistently. Children must hear you reading proficiently and frequently to demonstrate pace, accuracy, expression and comprehension. 

• Provide frequent opportunities for repeated reading. Repeated exposure to the same text enables readers to focus on improving their fluency rather than decoding the words. Read, re-read, repeat!

What to avoid:

• Over-reliance on silent reading.

• Round robin reading

• Teaching phonics skills in isolation*.

*Phonics should always be connected to reading. Students need opportunities to meaningfully apply their phonics knowledge to text - through application, the learning sticks.

Want to learn more about fluency? Download the ‘Fluency Guidance for Teachers’ below for an in depth look into Clara’s recommendations on how to build fluency with struggling readers.