Why is Teaching Fluency Important?

Question to consider:

Why is it important to improve fluency in the primary grades? What strategies can educators use to improve fluency?

Audience:

Teachers who teach in the primary grades. (This is only the intended audience, please share with parents or whoever may deem this site useful)

How to promote this blog?

I will share this link with everyone in my social network that works in primary education. My hope is that a "ripple effect" will happen and people will forward this blog to others.

Summary/Framework:

After completing more research to support fluency, my project has taken an unexpected turn. I originally wanted to create a resource to help parents and teachers provide support in the areas of comprehension, decoding, and fluency. After the initial consultation with the professor, I narrowed my focus down to fluency. Where fluency is “A growing body of evidence points to reading fluency as an important factor in student reading success” (Rasinski, 2004). The direction I am now taking is to create a resource that supports teachers in the area of fluency for primary students who are at average to below average reading levels. After reading multiple articles, there was a commonality I found, which was that rereading and/or reviewing the text multiple times, befitted primary students’ fluency development. Therefore, the focus for my blog will be to provide teachers with a variety of strategies to promote and develop fluency.

All of the strategies have some component of reviewing the text given to primary students multiple times through rereads or oral repeating of the text. The framework for my blog will be to present teachers with multiple strategies that can be used in the classroom or at home, that will support fluency development. It will provide a brief description of the strategy and how to deliver this strategy in a lesson. I will include a part of the analysis of the strategy, when they are available, to show the research that supports a positive correlation between the strategy and increased student performance. The first part of my blog will be an introduction into the importance of fluency to develop literacy skills. The second part of my blog will be different strategies that teachers can implement into their language arts program.

Main ideas:

Literacy is the foundation of education. Those who are illiterate are destined to struggle in our current education system and arguably in our current way of living. Learning to read is a major part of increasing literacy skills. Is fluency important? Fluency develops “automaticity in word recognition and prosody or expressiveness in oral reading” (Schreiber,1980, 1987, 1991; Schreiber & Read, 1980). Readers who develop good oral prosody, a part of fluency, “tend to have better comprehension in silent reading” (Rasinski, 2011). A major component of reading is fluency and “the report of the National Reading Panel included fluency as one of the necessary elements of effective reading instruction” (Ring, J, Barefoot, L, Avrit, J ,. Brown, S, & Black, J., 2012). Yet, fluency seems to be an area of literacy that receives very little attention as Rasinski's research stated that “reading fluency was no longer a hot topic for reading. Moreover, those same experts determined that fluency should also not be considered a hot topic” (Rasinski, 2012). One of the issues with non-fluent readers is that “non-fluent reader reads slowly, paying the most attention to the decoding of the words and therefore his or her fluency, and comprehension is affected” (Faver, 2008). Fluency has been described as the “bridge from phonics to comprehension” (Rasinski & Samuels, 2012). If we want students to develop their literacy skills, fluency plays an important role that has been undervalued. It is reasonable to want students to become fluent readers and teaching fluency is an important teaching practice that promotes fluent reading.

Rereading is important to fluency because it “improves the reading fluency and comprehension of both nondisabled (ND) students and students with LD” (Therrien, 2004). The importance of rereading allows learners to “read it more fluently and comprehend it better” (Therrien, 2004). The skills of rereading are not only beneficial to the text being read but “repeated reading may also improve students’ ability to fluently read and comprehend new passages” (Therrien, 2004). One of the benefits of reviewing a text multiple times is that the reader can recognize words faster and “students who automatically recognized words while reading could allocate more cognitive energy to higher order process such as reading comprehension” (Young,Valadez, & Gandara, 2016).

• Faver, S. (2008). Repeated reading of poetry can enhance reading fluency. Reading Teacher, 62(4), 350-352. doi: 10.1598/RT.62.4.8

• Rasinski, T. (2004). What Research Says About Reading. Educational leadership. Volume 61, Number 6, Pages 46-51.

• Rasinski, T. & Samuels, S. J. (2011). Reading fluency: What it is and what it is not. In S. J. Samuels & A. E. Farstrup (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (4th ed., pp. 94-114). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

• Rasinski, T. (2012). Why Reading Fluency Should be Hot. Reading Teacher, 65(8), 516-522. doi:10.1002/TRTR.01077

• Ring, J, Barefoot, L, Avrit, J ,. Brown, S, & Black, J.(2012). Reading Fluency Instruction for Students at Risk for Reading Failure. Remedial and Special Education  Vol 34, Issue 2, pp. 102- 112 Sourced From: https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1177/0741932511435175

• Schreiber, P., & Read, C. (1980). Children's use of phonetic cues in spelling, parsing, and-maybe-reading. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 209-224. doi:10.1007/BF02653719

• Therrien, W. (2004). Fluency and comprehension gains as a result of repeated reading. Remedial and Special Education, 25(4), 252-261. doi:10.1177/07419325040250040801

• Young, C., Valadez, C., & Gandara, C. (2016). Using performance methods to enhance students' reading fluency. The Journal of Educational Research, 109(6), 624-630. doi:10.1080/00220671.2015.1016599