Fluency

Chapter 8 discusses fluency, its components, and how to create fluent readers. It begins by telling a story of a student, Jimmy, who had a lot of trouble reading. In class I know many of us did the activity the book discusses “round robin reading” in which each student in the class takes a turn reading a passage from the book. For many students this is a non-issue, but for those students (like Jimmy) who have difficulty reading this can be a very daunting task. There were always students in class who had not mastered automaticity in reading and struggled through each word of the text. This made it uncomfortable for not only them, but for the other students as well. My question would be, is it appropriate to force struggling readers to read aloud during class? 

This chapter defines fluency as, “the ability to read rapidly, smoothly, without many errors, and with appropriate expression.” (Graves, 224.) Fluency is often thought of in terms of reading aloud, but there are two aspects to fluency- oral and silent. For a student to be considered fluent they must master both oral and silent reading. In addressing my question above, it comes to my attention that without doing read aloud activities in class it would be difficult for a teacher to determine which students are struggling with oral fluency. However, it is common that these embarrassing experiences with reading often turn children off of it altogether because they associate reading with negative experiences. 

This chapter explains that fluency is divided into three main stages; emergent literacy stage, decoding stage, and the automaticity stage. In the first stage the student learns basic aspects of reading. For example the physical aspects of the words like we read from left to right and top to bottom. In the second stage students are learning to decode words and their meanings individually. In the third stage children do not focus on individual words but on reading the whole passage smoothly and with few errors. If the student does not start in the process early, they need extra help later on in becoming fluent readers. Fluency is an essential part in our learning process because it is used in every single subject in school and it is necessary to our students’ success. Graves explains that our brains ability to process information is limited, so automaticity in processing words is important to the process of comprehension. 

The book discusses a number of different methods to increasing fluency including repeated reading, echo reading, tape assisted repeated reading, partner reading, choral reading, readers theater, and radio reading. As a teacher I would definitely implement some of these activities. Im a big fan of repeated reading because students will become more comfortable with a reading, and practice is truly one of the most effective ways in which to master reading. I also love the idea of readers theater, this allows children to have fun in a reading setting rather than feeling pressured and embarrassed in a round robin reading type atmosphere.