Today I will be talking about the final component of reading: fluency. Many people think that fluency means how quickly you can read. That is partially true, but there is more to it than that. In addition to being able to read at a reasonable rate, readers also need to be accurate and have expression.
Fluency is like the bridge between decoding and comprehension. If you read too slowly, you lose the mental picture. If you read with too many mistakes, it won’t make sense. If you lack expression, you group words incorrectly, inhibiting meaning.
When students lack fluency, it could be for several reasons. If they are making lots of mistakes or stumbling over words, the child may have some phonological impairment. They may not have enough decoding skills to be fluent, yet. If they are reading very slowly, there could be a lack of word recognition. Research shows that 60-80% of poor readers are both slow and have difficulty decoding.
Good readers are able to effortlessly process and store words for immediate recall while reading. This requires them to have advanced phonemic awareness, good letter/sound knowledge, and good long-term memory for phonemes (word chunks).
How do we increase a child’s fluency?
First, it is important to rule out any underlying difficulties. Check to see how they do with the spoken language first. Are they able to hear and isolate the first sound in a word? The middle sound? The ending sound? Can they take off the beginnings or endings of words and change them for others? (Say bat. Take off /b/ and change it to /k/ “cat”). Can they rhyme?
Next, check to see if they are able to identify all the sounds that go with the written letters. The English language has so many sounds and so many different spellings! The child may have gaps in their knowledge of things such as the silent e, or r-controlled vowels, or silent letters such as kn, wr, or dge.
Once these difficulties have been corrected, you can focus on how to group or “chunk” words within a sentence to make phrases. Sometimes children are unsure of how punctuation helps us to read. One of the best ways that you can help your child is to read with them, and to them, and have them follow along with you. After you read a passage, have them read it to you.
How you learn individual words affects how you learn to read. Skilled readers are able to look at thousands of words and immediately recognize meanings without effort. Struggling readers will need many repetitions. An average student will need 4-14 repetitions before a word is stored in their long-term memory. A less able student will need 20-200 or even more repetitions for the same results. Be patient! Every child is different. Take things slowly and don’t criticize the progress. Small steps forward is still growth.