- Accuracy in word decoding: reader must be able to sound out words (using phonics and other word decoding strategies) in text with few errors.
- Automatic processing: This is when the reader uses as little mental effort as possible in the decoding of text, saving mental energy for comprehension.
- Prosody or Prosodic reading: Prosody is a linguistic concept that refers to such features in oral language as intonation, pitch, stress, pauses, and the duration placed on specific syllables.
Common Core State Standard: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.2.4 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
Strategies to build fluency (taken and adapted from Reading and Learning to Read [2012]):
- Repeated Readings: “Oral repeated readings provide additional sensory reinforcement for the reader, allowing him or her to focus on the prosodic elements of reading that are essential to phrasing. Oral readings also ensure that the student is actually reading, not skimming or scanning the text” (Rasinski, 2003).
- Automated Reading: Listening while reading a text (simultaneous listening and reading [SLR]). Procedure as follows:
- Student listen individually to recorded stories, simultaneously following along with the written text. They read and listen repeatedly to the same story until they can read the story fluently.
- When students first begin this method, it may take as long as a month before they are able to read a fairly long story aloud fluently. As they become more proficient with SLR, the time can be reduced by as much as half (Chomsky [1976]).
Tips for parents:
- Exposure to Texts: Expose students to as much reading as possible, whether it be their independent reading, or Parent-Child reading time.
- Reread familiar texts. Read reading favorite books helps children become fluent.
- Echo-Read: Echo reading is a rereading strategy designed to help students develop expressive, fluent reading. The parent reads a short segment of text (sentence or phrase), and the student echoes back the same sentence or phrase while following along in the text.
- Use predictable books: To build fluency, parents should read books with children that have predictable, rhythmic patterns so the child can “hear” the sound of fluent reading as he or she reads the book aloud.
Strategies adapted from:
Vacca, J. A. L., R. T. Vacca, M. K. Gove, L. C. Burkey, L. A. Lenhart, and C. A. McKeon. Reading and learning to read. 8th. 8th. Boston, MA: Allyn , 2012. Print.
