What do we mean by Developing Fluency?
Christopher Such (2023) provides a rounded definition of fluency, beginning with its origins, before extending it to its updated reading-focused meaning. According to him,
Useful Resources
The OECD (2023) builds on this further, stating that,
“To read fluently, readers must recognise words within a text accurately and automatically, then parse and process the words into a coherent whole in order to comprehend the overall meaning of the text...Once students read fluently, they can devote their effort and attention to higher-level comprehension tasks and engage more deeply with texts
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD), 2023These strategies include:
Echo reading
Choral reading
Modelling prosody
Phrasing
Providing opportunities for repeated reading and following along of texts using different communication approaches.
So, what does this look like for a wide range of learners? Can reading fluency be assessed and taught in the same ways for all learners? Teachers, particularly those of students who are users of AAC devices and/or students with medical barriers to using speech, would agree that fluency must be approached in a different way for some pupils. How is it possible to measure prosody, for example? How do we know how fast a student is accurately decoding and making sense of a word, phrase or sentence? This is an area requiring further investigation and research, and, while the assessment of fluency may look different, the modelling required by teachers and some of the strategies promoted as effective in developing fluency, should still be modelled.
“Given the origins of the word ‘fluency’ in the Latin word fluere meaning ‘flowing,’ one can imagine the idea of reading fluency as a natural, continuous stream of words. [Specifically], reading involves accuracy, automaticity and prosody.”
The Art and Science of Primary Reading
Christopher Such, 2023Foundations in Literacy Instruction