What is Fluency?
The three major components of fluency are:
- Accuracy– accuracy is an important component of fluency because understanding the text they are reading will become more difficult if they are not reading accurately. To assess accuracy, an IRI calculation can be administered to an individual student by using their calculated number of (mispronunciations, substitutions, misspells…etc.)
- Automaticity– this component of reading is important because being able to read words without struggling helps students have better comprehension of the text they are reading. Can be assessed by judging the rate of reading as Indicated in an IRI.
- Prosody– prosody is important to reading because when a student reads with expression it gives more meaning to the text they are reading. Prosody is the most difficult to assess out of the three components. One of the reasons it may be more challenging to assess lack of agreement on variations on appropriate phrasing.
How to Teach it:
- Choose appropriate texts
- Set a purpose for reading
- Model how reading is done
- Give feedback
- Re-read
- 30-45 minutes a day
Activities to Practice the Skill of Fluency:
- Choral Reading- Choral Reading is reading a passage in concert either in pairs or a larger group.
- Reading Theater- students taking parts in reading (like a play) and read out loud.
- Read with a partner