Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read a text correctly and quickly. Learn which strategies are recommended to improve students' fluency and how to incorporate these strategies at home and in the classroom.
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How Fluently Do Our Children Read?
Fluency means reading quickly and accurately with proper phrasing, expression, and attention to syntax (or word order). Find out what percentage of America's fourth graders read fluently in this report of a national assessment of oral reading.
Academic Language: Everyone's "Second" Language
Being able to speak English fluently does not guarantee that a student will be able to use language effectively in academic settings. Fluency must be combined with higher order thinking skills to create an "academic language," which allows students to effectively present their ideas in a way that others will take seriously. The author, an ELL teacher, describes her use of "protocols" (a cheat sheet of sentence starters) to build students' cognitive academic language proficiency.
Fluency: Instructional Guidelines and Student Activities
The best strategy for developing reading fluency is to provide your students with many opportunities to read the same passage orally several times. To do this, you should first know what to have your students read. Second, you should know how to have your students read aloud repeatedly.
