Improving Reading Fluency

I recently talked to a friend who mentioned her child struggled with reading fluency. Reading fluency is important to helping comprehension so I thought I would look

Reading Rockets had great information on improving reading fluency and gives several classroom strategies that can help.

Timed repeated readings – “Timed repeated readings are an instructional practice for monitoring students' fluency development. Repeated readings, under timed conditions, of familiar instructional level text can increase students' reading speed which can improve comprehension.”

Audio assisted readings – “Audio-assisted reading is an individual or group reading activity where students read along in their books as they hear a fluent reader read the book on an audio recording (audiotape, audio book, or iPod). As confidence and reading skills develop, students read the same passage or text without the assistance of the audio recording.”

Shared readings– “Shared Reading is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a book or other text while guided and supported by a teacher. The teacher explicitly models the skills of proficient readers, including reading with fluency and expression. The shared reading model often uses oversized books (referred to as big books) with enlarged print and illustrations.”

Choral Reading – “Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students. Choral reading helps build students' fluency, self-confidence, and motivation. Because students are reading aloud together, students who may ordinarily feel self-conscious or nervous about reading aloud have built-in support.”

Reader’s Theater - “Reader's theater is a strategy for developing reading fluency. It involves children in oral reading through reading parts in scripts. In using this strategy, students do not need to memorize their part; they need only to reread it several times, thus developing their fluency skills. The best reader's theater scripts include lots of dialogue.”

Paired Reading - Paired reading is a research-based fluency strategy used with readers who lack fluency. In this strategy, students read aloud to each other. When using partners, more fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers, or children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a story they have already read. Paired reading can be used with any book, taking turns reading by sentence, paragraph, page or chapter.

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