The Importance of Fluency As David LIben, who in an author of the Common Core standards, stated, “Fluency does not gurantee comprehension, but a lack of fluency gurantees almost all the time a lack of comprehension, especially with more complex text.” As outlined in ‘Both and’ Literacy Instruction K-5: A Proposed Paradigm Shift for the Common Core State Standards ELA Classroom: To assure that all young readers achieve reading fluency, well-developed materials need to provide frequent and differentiated opportunities for students to practice oral reading and receive feedback. For at least the next several years of transition to CCSS, reading fluency will be an issue for many students up and down the grades since much of what is being read is the more complex text called for by the CCSS (Benjamin and Schwanenflugel, 2010). Students also need to be given the opportunity to listen to fluent reading while following along in the text and “reading in their head” (Chard, et al 2002). The emphasis on fluency instruction must include expression (prosody), as well as accuracy and a chance to develop one’s own sense of a reading rate appropriate to the text being read. All of this must be clearly and strongly connected to comprehension. Practicing to read fluently offers an authentic opportunity to apply a broad range of cueing systems facile readers use automatically: grapho-phonemic, semantic and syntactic clues are all taken in during the course of proficient reading. To ensure all students are getting the chance to become fluent, there need to be several more elements folded into a ‘both and’ literacy classroom. There needs to be a way for teachers to systematically assess fluency, the program needs to have systems for teachers to monitor those results, and it needs to provide all students with the opportunity, the time and the attention needed to become fluent. Not as an end in itself, but as a necessary precursor to independent reading success. A strong reading foundation is the essential bedrock students need to access for themselves the world of knowledge and ideas stored in print and to find the joy and rewards available in the universe of books. By itself, it is not sufficient. Without it, though, children cannot hope to read “independently and proficiently.”
The Importance of Fluency As David LIben, who in an author of the Common Core standards, stated, “Fluency does not gurantee comprehension, but a lack of fluency gurantees almost all the time a lack of comprehension, especially with more complex text.” As outlined in ‘Both and’ Literacy Instruction K-5: A Proposed Paradigm Shift for the Common Core State Standards ELA Classroom: To assure that all young readers achieve reading fluency, well-developed materials need to provide frequent and differentiated opportunities for students to practice oral reading and receive feedback. For at least the next several years of transition to CCSS, reading fluency will be an issue for many students up and down the grades since much of what is being read is the more complex text called for by the CCSS (Benjamin and Schwanenflugel, 2010). Students also need to be given the opportunity to listen to fluent reading while following along in the text and “reading in their head” (Chard, et al 2002). The emphasis on fluency instruction must include expression (prosody), as well as accuracy and a chance to develop one’s own sense of a reading rate appropriate to the text being read. All of this must be clearly and strongly connected to comprehension. Practicing to read fluently offers an authentic opportunity to apply a broad range of cueing systems facile readers use automatically: grapho-phonemic, semantic and syntactic clues are all taken in during the course of proficient reading. To ensure all students are getting the chance to become fluent, there need to be several more elements folded into a ‘both and’ literacy classroom. There needs to be a way for teachers to systematically assess fluency, the program needs to have systems for teachers to monitor those results, and it needs to provide all students with the opportunity, the time and the attention needed to become fluent. Not as an end in itself, but as a necessary precursor to independent reading success. A strong reading foundation is the essential bedrock students need to access for themselves the world of knowledge and ideas stored in print and to find the joy and rewards available in the universe of books. By itself, it is not sufficient. Without it, though, children cannot hope to read “independently and proficiently.”