Fluency

Fluency is a term used to describe how well a reader reads.  There are a few different aspects to being a fluent reader.  At the earliest levels, fluency has to do with how smoothly a student reads and how well they use inflection in their reading.  As they become more proficient, generally by about second grade, we start to measure fluency as how many words they can read correctly in one minute.

Fluency is important because unless we are reading with fluency, we will not understand what we are reading.  How many times have you been reading something that includes words from a foreign language and you are busy trying to decipher the meaning of the words?  Or perhaps in a textbook in college?  We often have to go back and re-read materials if we were not able to read them fluently, because we missed the meaning of what we just read.

In the Resource Room, we typically do not measure “fluency” the same way that the general education teachers do.  This is because our students are struggling with reading and are not quite ready for that type of fluency measure. 

We do work on fluency, however.  We use a program called 6-Minute Fluency and the resources we use come from a book titled The Six Minute Solution: A Reading Fluency Program (Intermediate Level).

This is copyrighted material, so I cannot share it here.  However, we can use the strategies/concepts from the program.

The way it works is simple.  The students read from a passage for one minute each day for 6 days.  The person assessing the student uses a timer and has a copy of the passage where they mark their errors.  After the minute is up, they count how many words were read correctly and write it on the page.  The student’s goal is to improve their score each day that they read it.  You could do this with literally anything.  I usually tally the words correct divided by the words attempted to get a fluency measure for goal tracking.

For my students who are still working on the first hundred high-frequency words (aka Tricky Words), we have them practice reading word lists made up of 25 of those words.  The main thing to remember with these is that the students must read the words left-to-right, top-to-bottom.  We must train their eyes and brain to read the words in the correct direction.

Below is a link to some free fluency passages you can print and use for fluency practice at home.

Think Fluency:  Fluency passages you can download and use for free