Why Is Fluency Important?

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Table of Contents

What Is Fluency?

Fluency is defined as reading words accurately, automatically, with appropriate expression, and understanding. The National Literacy Panel has identified it as one of the five pillars of reading. The other 4 are phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Imagine fluency as driving. When a person first learns to drive, they are slow, uncoordinated, and shaky. A short drive consumes the new driver’s energy and effort with the smallest details. Are they pushing the gas hard enough, but not too hard? Are they are following the speed limit?  How do they trigger the right blinker? As the driver becomes more experienced, these skills start to work together in a coordinated, effortless way.  The driver can now execute on these lower skills with little to no thought. Their brain power is now free to focus on navigating difficult roads to get to their destination.

Fluency is similar to driving in this way. It is a multifaceted skill involving all other areas of reading to come together. A reader must be so proficient at all the sub-skills of reading that they become second nature so that the reader can focus their attention on higher-level skills. 

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Why Is Fluency Important?

Fluency has been described as the bridge between “learning to read” and “reading to learn.” By third grade, children are expected to read to learn unfamiliar concepts, new vocabulary, interpret metaphors, and follow a storyline. None of these skills can be tapped into if the student is stuck at the word reading level. Their mental bandwidth is tied up trying to decode individual words which affects their comprehension.

Children who are at the lower reading level have choppy, labored, and monotone reading because their attention is focused on matching the correct sounds to letters. They are still working on foundational skills including letter recognition, letter sound correlation, and recognizing letter patterns. Children must practice reading beyond accuracy in order to reach automatic word recognition. As children get more practice in their foundation skills, word reading takes up less of their mental bandwidth and they become more fluent. They are now able to focus their attention on phrasing, expression, and comprehension.

Fluency and Learning Disabilities

In order for a child to move out of the dysfluent stage of reading and into reading with fluency, they must have a certain threshold of automatic word recognition. Automatic word recognition builds over time, with practice. Children with learning disabilities have trouble with word automaticity and accuracy. Both of these affect fluency.

Research-based interventions like Take Flight give children with learning disabilities the tools they need to read. They teach children explicit word reading techniques using structured literacy. Reading progresses from sound-symbol associations to word blending and segmenting, word recognition, and connected text. 

Evidence shows that there is a big difference between the amount of reading exposure needed to develop word reading accuracy. 

  • Neurotypical children need 4-14 repetitions for young readers.
  • Students with reading disabilities need more than 40 repetitions. This number is just a baseline. Learning disabilities such as dyslexia exist on a spectrum and could require far more repetitions.

A dyslexic child can be given the tools to read in a way that makes sense for their brain using explicit and systemic instruction. They can reach automatic word recognition with time and sufficient reading exposure.

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Best Practices

The National Reading Panel reviewed fluency intervention studies and found the following practices to be best for boosting fluency, word recognition, and comprehension. Follow our link to reading fluency strategies to learn more about how to support your child.

  • Repeated reading: Students reread short and engaging passages at their reading level. 
  • Paired reading: Higher level readers are paired with lower level readers. They take turns reading lines from a passage.
  • Radio reading: The student practices a passage as many as necessary to read aloud as if they were a radio announcer.
  • Neurological impress: Teacher and student read aloud together from the same passage. The teacher reads slighter faster and sets the pace for the student.

Do you have any fluency-specific questions? Please leave them in the comments or reach out to us via our connect page.