Best Practice

Teaching the three elements of reading fluency

Literacy & English Quality First Teaching School libraries
What are the three elements of reading fluency and how do we teach them? And crucially, how do we support children who present with dysfluency? Kathy Roe advises
Fluency not speed: We must debunk the myth that reading fluency is synonymous with reading speed – speedy reading is not always good reading - Adobe Stock

Reading fluency is becoming a buzz topic thanks to its mention in high-profile guidance such as the Department for Education’s Reading Framework (DfE, 2021), the Education Endowment Foundation’s Improving literacy in key stage 2 guidance (Bilton & Duff, 2021), and Ofsted’s 2024 English education subject report entitled Telling the story.

 

What is reading fluency? And what is it not?

Reading fluency is not a fixed milestone which children are able to reach; it is not a visible nor invisible line over which pupils, once they have reached a certain competence with decoding text, can cross.

Rather than thinking about “fluent readers” or “not fluent readers”, it might be more helpful to think of fluency at each stage of reading competency (DfE, 2021).

For instance, a child in year 6 may be unable to read an age-appropriate text with fluency. They might stumble over lower utility vocabulary and ignore the punctuation. However, the same child might be able to read a well-known picture book from their younger years with perfect cadence and expression. They have achieved fluency on an easier pitch of text.

As adult readers, we might find ourselves reading from a news article or novel with unconscious fluency but discover that when reading from an academic journal outside of our expertise, our own reading becomes distinctly less assured.

Our aim as educators is to support our pupils to achieve reading fluency when reading an age-appropriate, curriculum-appropriate text.

It may also be helpful to debunk the myth that reading fluency is synonymous with reading speed. Speedy reading is not always good reading. Instead, the aim of fluency practice should be to support pupils to “read at a pace which allows comprehension to flourish”. Indeed, some children actually slow down when taught to read effectively and fluently (for more look at the EEF’s Reading Fluency Misconceptions pdf – available via its Fluency resources webpage – see further information).

The EEF’s Reading Fluency Glossary resource (also available via the Fluency resources webpage) explains that reading fluency can be defined as reading with:

  1. Accuracy (or word recognition).
  2. Automaticity (reading those words on sight, without thinking).
  3. Prosody (reading with expression, stresses and intonation).

 

1, Accuracy

Rasinski (2012) talks about reading fluency as the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. It is not enough to be able to apply known grapheme-phoneme correspondences and read a word accurately.

This alone will not make a child a good reader. Children need to read those words both accurately and automatically. Pupils need to be able to read with very little cognitive space being devoted to sounding out and blending.

If all their energy is going into reading the words carefully, there will be insufficient space left for understanding.

 

2, Automaticity

If words are read effortlessly, there is plenty of energy left for the most important task – comprehension. This is, after all, the whole point of reading. We want children to be able to visualise, to make connections, to draw inferential understanding and enjoyment from the print on the page.

 

3, Prosody

Prosody can be thought of as reading with expression. Readers who place the correct stresses, intonation, pitch, volume, phrasing and pausing when reading could be said to read prosodically. Readers not only use prosody to convey meaning when reading a text aloud to a listener, but also to themselves when silently reading.

Imagine a time when you have heard a very dysfluent read, perhaps when a child has read something aloud which was too hard. As a listener, it would have been difficult to follow the thread of the text. We need to apply good prosody as readers in order for a text to make sense to us too.

 

How do we teach these three elements of fluency?

Accuracy is taught, practised and honed through a systematic, synthetic phonics programme and it will be improved through regular practice with independent application into reading and writing.

Alongside that synthetic phonics programme, schools are building in regular fluency practice through re-reading of decodable books and building sufficient rehearsal so that children understand the need to apply expression at the point of reading.

Building in fluency practice for all children as part of their early reading diet is advisable to ensure that the bridge is built and well-trodden, and that children understand really early on that the point of reading is understanding and enjoyment, not just decoding.

Additionally, in schools where the wider reading diet caters to prosody-building through regular poetry recital and song, even greater gains in fluency are seen.

Automaticity and prosody are often the missing elements when we encounter dysfluency in older readers. That bridge between word reading and comprehension has not been built. Dysfluent pupils can be identified by the crunchy, staccato nature of their reading.

It will be noticeable that all their efforts are being spent on the accurate reading of each individual word, and that lack of automaticity leads inevitably to a lack of prosody. Some readers will pay no regard to punctation, and their lack of understanding will be obvious to an audience when being tasked with reading aloud, perhaps from a challenging age-related text.

 

How do we support children who present with dysfluency?

If we want our pupils to be able to read challenging, high-quality literature with good understanding and enjoyment, then the solution is to explicitly teach automaticity and prosody.

The good news is this can be done in a way which will elicit joy, even in the most reluctant of readers. Rasinski says that “a good teacher must be both a scientist and an artist”.

What this means is that once educators understand, through accurate and diagnostic reading assessment, which children require fluency instruction, then teaching it can (and should!) be authentic, creative and motivational for learners.

Teachers can build automaticity and prosody in pupils through repeated reading of key texts. These can be poems, songs, speeches and any other text which commands plenty of re-reading or performance. Inviting children to read and perform their own writing builds automaticity and prosody too.

Moving away from round-robin reading and into assisted reading, with the teacher as the expert, also facilitates improvements in prosody.

 

Final thoughts

Once pupils improve their own reading, their confidence and enjoyment improve too. They start to enjoy reading; they want to do more of it and in turn they get better and better at it.

  • Kathy Roe was a teacher and school leader and now leads the Reading Fluency Project at HFL Education. Contact her via reading.fluency@hfleducation.org. Formerly Herts for Learning, HFL Education is a not-for-profit organisation providing services, training and resources for schools, including access to advisers and subject experts. This year Headteacher Update is working with HFL Education to publish a series of subject-specific best practice articles. Find all the articles in this series via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/hfl-education 

 

Further information & resources

 

Further reading from Headteacher Update