What Does Research Say About Fluency and Reading Comprehension

What Is Fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read "like you speak." Hudson, Lane, and Pullen define fluency this way: "Reading fluency is made up of at to the lowest degree three key elements: accurate reading of continued text at a conversational rate with advisable prosody or expression." Not-fluent readers suffer in at least one of these aspects of reading: they make many mistakes, they read slowly, or they don't read with appropriate expression and phrasing.

​ Developing reading fluency with Read Naturally Strategy programs

Primal Concepts

Why Is Fluency Important?

For many years, educators have recognized that fluency is an important attribute of reading. Reading researchers agree. Over 30 years of research indicates that fluency is i of the critical building blocks of reading, considering fluency evolution is directly related to comprehension.

Here are the results of 1 study by Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, and Jenkins that shows how oral reading fluency correlates highly with reading comprehension.

Measure	Validity Coefficients
Oral Recall/Retelling	.seventy
Cloze (fill up in the blank)	.72
Question Answering	.82
Oral Reading Fluency	.91

To translate this type of correlation data, consider that a perfect match would exist i.0. As you lot can come across, oral recall/retelling, fill in the blank, and question answering are all above 0.6, which indicates there is a stiff correlation. But oral reading fluency is by far the strongest, with a .91 correlation.

Many researchers, including Breznitz, Armstrong, Knupp, Lesgold, and Pinnell, accept found that fluency is highly correlated with reading comprehension—that is, when a educatee reads fluently, that pupil is probable to comprehend what he or she is reading.

Why are reading fluency and reading comprehension so highly correlated? Dr. S. Jay Samuels, a professor and researcher well known for his work in fluency, put forth a theory called the automaticity theory. According to Dr. Samuels, people have a limited amount of mental free energy. If you want to multitask or to get proficient at a circuitous task such every bit reading, you first need to master the component tasks and then yous can practice them automatically. For example, a reader who must focus his or her attending on decoding words may not accept enough mental energy left over to remember about the meaning of the text. Notwithstanding, a fluent reader who tin can automatically decode the words tin can instead give full attention to comprehending the text. To become practiced readers, our students need to become automatic with text so they tin pay attention to the meaning.

See also:

• Determining who needs fluency didactics
• Hasbrouck-Tindal oral reading fluency norms
• Video: Why reading fluency is important

Challenges Faced by Non-Fluent Readers

Students become fluent by reading. Some students learn to read fluently without explicit instruction. For others, however, fluency doesn't develop in the course of normal classroom instruction.

Research analyzed by the National Reading Panel suggests that but encouraging students to read independently isn't the virtually effective way to improve reading achievement. Besides often, simply encouraging at-risk students to read doesn't result in increased reading on their part. During sustained silent reading, at-hazard readers may get a book with mostly pictures and look at the pictures, or they choose a hard book then they will expect like everyone else and so pretend to read.

Even if at-take chances students do read, they read more slowly than the other students. In a ten-infinitesimal reading period, a good reader who reads 200 words a infinitesimal silently could read 2,000 words. In the aforementioned 10 minutes, an at-take chances student who reads 50 words a minute would only read 500 words. This is equal reading time but certainly non an equal number of words read.

These students need to read more, just just asking them to read on their own oft doesn't work. The National Reading Panel has concluded that a more effective course of action is for united states of america to explicitly teach developing readers how to read fluently, footstep by pace.

Research-Proven Fluency Strategies

How exercise nosotros explicitly teach students to read fluently? The National Reading Panel found data supporting three strategies that improve fluency, comprehension, and reading achievement—instructor modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring.

Teacher Modeling

The first strategy is instructor modeling. Research demonstrates that various forms of modeling tin can improve reading fluency. Examples of teacher modeling include:

• Teacher-assisted reading
• Peer-assisted reading
• Audio-assisted reading

Teacher modeling involves more than just listening to someone else read. Students must exist actively involved 100 per centum of the time and in a multisensory way.

Instructor modeling teaches discussion recognition in a meaningful context, demonstrates correct phrasing, and gives students exercise tracking across the page. A kid can benefit from teacher modeling one time he or she knows at to the lowest degree 50 sight words and has a good sense of first sounds.

The reading rate of the model reader is important. Christopher Skinner, a reading researcher, plant that students who read lists of words with him slowly were more fluent with the words than students who read with him at a faster charge per unit. The slower rate enables students to learn new words and clarify difficult words. Every bit students learn more than words, they naturally become more fluent.

Another form of modeling is the neurological impress method. In the neurological impress method, a expert and a struggling reader read together from a passage, with the more able reader reading almost the rate of the struggling reader. Heckelman (1969) showed that after 29 fifteen-minute sessions, 24 seventh- through 9th-grade boys, who were an average of three years backside in reading, gained an average of 1.ix years in reading based on the Oral Gilmore and the California Achievement Exam.

Repeated Reading

Another technique that research has shown significantly builds reading fluency is repeated reading. In fact, the National Reading Panel says this is the nearly powerful way to amend reading fluency. This involves merely reading the same material over and over once again until accurate and expressive.

In the 1970s, LaBerge and Samuels studied what happens when students read passages over and over over again. They institute that when students reread passages, they got faster at reading the passages, understood them better, and were able to read subsequent passages better every bit a result of the repeated reading.

Repeated reading is a form of mastery learning. The students read the same words so many times that they brainstorm to know them and are able to identify them in other text. Besides helping students bring words to mastery, repeated reading changes the way students view themselves in relation to the human action of reading.

Progress Monitoring

People who play video games are presented with a specific goal and with immediate, relevant feedback nearly their progress toward that goal. This combination of having a goal and getting feedback on progress can be very motivating.

Progress monitoring takes advantage of this combination to motivate students to read. You give students a specific, individual reading goal, and you tell them exactly how you're going to know they've met it. Then, you give them the means to measure how they're doing. Finally, you lot make it elementary plenty that they'll know they've met their goal even before you practise. This progress monitoring is what motivates students to practice reading the same story over and over until achieving mastery.

​Developing Reading Fluency With Read Naturally Strategy Programs

The inquiry-based Read Naturally Strategy combines these iii strategies into highly effective programs that advance reading achievement. Students go confident readers by developing fluency, phonics skills, comprehension, and vocabulary while reading leveled text. The time-tested intervention programs engage students with interesting nonfiction stories and yield powerful results.

 Larn more about the Read Naturally Strategy
 Research ground for the Read Naturally Strategy

The Read Naturally Strategy is bachelor in a diversity of formats:

Choosing the correct Read Naturally Strategy program

Bibliography

Armstrong, S. W. (1983). The effects of material difficulty upon learning disabled children's oral reading and reading comprehension.Learning Inability Quarterly, 6, pp. 339–348.

Breznitz, Z. (1987). Increasing first graders' reading accuracy and comprehension by accelerating their reading rates.Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(3), pp. 236–242.

Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., Hosp, M. Thousand., & Jenkins, J. R. (2001). Oral reading fluency every bit an indicator of reading competence: A theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis.Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), pp. 239–256.

Heckelman, R. G. (1969). A neurological-impress method of remedial-reading instruction.Academic Therapy Quarterly, 5(4), pp. 277–282.

Hudson, R. F., H. B. Lane, and P. C. Pullen. (2005). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how.Reading Instructor 58(viii), pp. 702-714.

Knupp, R. (1988). Improving oral reading skills of educationally handicapped elementary school-aged students through repeated readings. Practicum paper, Nova University (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 297275).

LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading.Cognitive Psychology, 6, pp. 292–323.

Lesgold, A., Resnick, L. B., & Hammond, Yard. (1985). Learning to read: A longitudinal study of word skill evolution in ii curricula. In K. Waller & E. MacKinon (eds.), Reading research:  Advances in theory and do. New York, NY: Academic Press.

National Reading Panel. (2000).Educational activity children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific inquiry literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Constitute of Kid Health and Human Development.

Pinnell, G. South., Pikulski, J. J., Wixson, K. K., Campbell, J. R., Gough, P. B., & Beatty, A. S. (1995).Listening to children read aloud: Information from NAEP's integrated reading performance record (IRPR) at grade four (NCES Publication 95-726). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics.

Samuels, S. J. (2002). Reading fluency: Its evolution and cess. In A. Eastward. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (eds.), What research has to say nigh reading teaching, 3rd ed., pp. 166–183. Newark, DE: International Reading Clan.

Samuels, S. J. (1997). The method of repeated readings.The Reading Teacher, fifty(5), pp. 376–381.

Samuels, S. J. (2006). Towards a model of reading fluency. In S. J. Samuels and A. Eastward. Farstrup (eds.), What inquiry has to say most fluency pedagogy. Newark, DE: International Reading Clan.

Samuels, Due south. J. (1997). The method of repeated readings.The Reading Teacher, fifty(5), pp. 376–381.

Skinner, C. H., Logan, P., Robinson, S. L., & Robinson, D. H. (1997). Sit-in equally a reading intervention for exceptional learners.Schoolhouse Psychology Review, 26(iii), pp. 437–447.

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