FLUENCY

Fluency is made up of three things: accuracy, rate, and prosody.

Accurate readers read text with few errors exactly as the author has it written. Rate is the speed at which we read. Prosody has many elements which should be the focus of our instruction.

Being able to read text fluently, with prosody, does not come naturally for many students. Even when decoding is proficient, they do not read with proper expression or prosody. Fluency needs to be taught explicitly in order for these students to gain the prosody that will lead to deep comprehension.

Oral reading rate is strongly correlated with students’ ability to comprehend both simple and complex text. Oral reading fluency depends upon and typically reflects comprehension (Honig et al., 2018).

Because prosody is most important and the focus of our instruction, it has many different elements that can be taught.

The prosody elements are: smoothness, volume and stress, intonation, phrasing, pausing and following punctuation, and expression.

Rate can increase with proper prosody instruction. Accuracy can increase with proper phonics instruction. Rate should not be the focus of instruction but is an OUTCOME of our prosody instruction.

Feedback and modeling with explicit think-aloud of how the prosody element is accomplished is needed with lots of TEXT READING for practice and application in familiar text by the students.

Integrating Oral Language into Fluency is important to allow students the opportunity to read words in connected text out loud to practice reading so it sounds like talking. Students can chorally read, buddy read, independently read, and whisper read. Multiple rereads are a fine way to improve prosody and increase fluency.