The Most Important Thing for Increasing Reading Fluency

I hope everyone got the opportunity to get some much needed R&R over Spring Break! If your Spring Break just started, lucky you! Well, I am back to work tomorrow and looking forward to it for the most part. I don’t love getting up early, but I do love working with my students. And with that, I want to share about increasing reading fluency in your students.

Having a fluent reader is definitely the end goal when teaching students to read. The more fluent the reader is, the more the reader will comprehend what they are reading. You will know a student is reading fluently when their reading sounds like they are talking. Fluent readers read at a moderate pace with accuracy and expression. So, the big question is, how do we get students to that place?

The single most important thing that I have learned is: Accuracy before speed.

Tests for fluency usually have a student read a grade level passage while being timed. The teacher then records the errors as the student reads. The amount of words read correctly during that time is calculated, and that is the number used to determine if a student is reading at grade level, below grade level, or above grade level.

What isn’t great about those tests is that a student who knows how the test works could read as fast as they can, reading only the words they know, and may score ok, expecially at the beginning of the year. Another problem is some students can read the words, but don’t have enough time to decode them. One further problem is some students just read slowly. This is why we know tests aren’t the end all, be all. We have to use our expertise as teachers to sift through the data and make informed decisions about our students.

So what I want to get across is that while some students may not look like they’re making the gains they need to make on a fluency test, it doesn’t mean they are not making gains. (Don’t worry. You’re an amazing teacher!😁) The gain you are looking for is in accuracy. You want your students to be applying the strategies you have taught them to read unknown words.

Typically I see a student start by reading a word by sounding out each letter and, then, blending it. Then, the student will begin to go word part by word part, then, blend. With unknown words, a student will get faster and faster at this type of decoding. This is when a student’s reading starts to speed up and the student begins to sound more fluent as a reader.

Also, sight words will come into play with fluent reading. The more words a student knows by sight, the faster the student will be able to read as well. And by sight words, I don’t mean words practiced over and over again from a list. I mean the words that a student has come across so many times that the word is known by sight by that student.

What this means for us as teachers is that we need to explicitly teach phonics skills to our students. This is how students will become more accurate with their reading. Students need to know how words work in order to take the letters of a word and read it correctly.

Once students are decoding single words correctly in isolation, move on to phrases, and, finally, sentences. Sentence reading is different than reading a list of words. Students have to learn how to group words into phrases and pause at punctutation marks.

Obviously, all of this would follow an I do, we, do, you do type of teaching method. Use your curriculum as a guide and/or any other professional development you have taken on teaching using the science of reading. If you are looking for some great instruction, check out LETRS. Read my post, LETRS: What is it? What does it entail? if you want a general overview of it from a teacher’s point of view.

Teaching high frequency words will help to an extent with fluency, too. I do not put as much of an emphasis on high frequency words as I do on teaching and practicing using reading strategies to decode words. However, it is good to teach students grade level high frequency words with unusual sound-spelling correspondences, commonly referred to as “heart words.”

As students are learning more and more about how to decode words, the best way to improve accuracy is with practice, practice, practice. We want our students use of these decoding strategies to become second nature. There are many ways to practice reading accurately! Here are some of the ones that I’ve gathered over time. I’m sure you’ve heard of many of them.

• Echo Reading (I Read, You Read)
• Choral Reading
• Using Whisper Phones
• Fluency Strips
• Reading in Silly Voices
• Partner Reading
• Readers’ Theater
• Recording Reading on a Device and Listening to it

Like with many skills, the time it takes a student to become a fluent reader will vary by student. If a student continues to struggle as a reader after repeated practice, bring them to the attention of the person who will be able to support you (probably a reading coach or admin).This way the student can get more support. The student may need reading intervention or further testing to look for a learning disability. Don’t wait until the end of the year to do this. By the beginning of the 2nd-3rd quarter, you should be able to tell if the student is not making adequate progress.

I hope you learned something new from reading this post, but, if not, I hope it was an excellent reminder of ALL the wonderful things you are already doing to support your students in becoming fluent readers! Keep doing those things and before you know it, the school year will be over. It seems to go by in the blink of an eye once Spring Break is over, doesn’t it?

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with LETRS. I am just a fan of the training.