Fluency
& Learning to Read - Reading Fluency
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What is Reading Fluency? - If you are like most parents, you aren't sure what fluency is. You might even be confusing "reading fluency" with fluency with the English language (this is NOT what it means). |
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The "What Works?" Report found that the five key areas in learning to read are phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency... Fluency?
Fluency surprised
many people when it made this list since
many of us did not have fluency practice
when we learned to read.
Fluency
is the ability to read text accurately
and quickly. Fluency bridges word decoding
and comprehension. Comprehension
is understanding what has been read.
Fluency is a set of skills that allows
readers to rapidly decode text while
maintaining high comprehension.
A first
benchmark for fluency is being able
to "sight read" some words.
The idea is that children will recognize
at sight the most common words in written
English and that instant reading of
these words will allow them to read
and understand text more quickly. Also,
since there are many common English
words that are so irregular according
to the rules of phonics, its best to
get children to just memorize them from
the start. For example, try sounding
out these words: "one", "was",
"if", "even", or
"the".
Many experts
quickly warn us that an over-emphasis
on sight reading early on can
be counterproductive by having children
focus on word memorization while avoiding
learning the all important techniques
of sounding out words. The bottom line
is that as children master the rules
of phonics, they should also master
by sight a limited number of commonly
encountered and often irregular words.
The best
discussion of this topic and a great
list of sight words can be
found on the SEDLwebsite. They
are among the most useful in providing
useful insights into the process of
learning to read.Parents assist with
fluency when they read aloud to children.
Once children are reading at first to
second grade level, exercises with timed
reading also help children improve their
reading speed. This type of exercise
is demanding of parents or instructors
since it requires active involvement.
Software
and on-line reading programs
can also provide great opportunities
for children to follow along in the
text as the program reads aloud and
for timed readings. Here is an example
of a read-along story used by Time4Reading.
With Time4Learning, these fluency skills
are taught and reinforced in a number
of ways. Start a membership
today.
For more
information on how the reading
skills are developed, look at the Time4Learning
Reading Skills Pyramid. For more information
on the NCLB Reading
First findings
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