Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers — and the words-correct per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. Here’s how teachers can use it to make well-informed and timely decisions about the instructional needs of their students.
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.
Beginning readers are not usually fluent, but classroom practices can help them develop this important skill. This article describes both direct and indirect methods for increasing fluency through classroom instruction.
Choral reading gives students practice in reading texts aloud, but individual feedback is tough to provide. Integrate other fluency strategies — such as paired reading — that give you more opportunity to observe and respond to each student.
While the ability to read words accurately is a necessary skill in learning to read, the speed at which this is done becomes a critical factor in ensuring that children understand what they read.
Teachers do their best to improve students’ fluency, but sometimes the information they have to work with is incomplete and, therefore, leads them down the wrong path. For example, silent reading or ‘Round Robin’ reading seem like good ways to improve fluency. But, in fact, increasing fluency requires more practice, more support, and more guided oral reading than either of these strategies can deliver.
Timed repeated readings are an instructional practice for monitoring students’ fluency development. Repeated readings, under timed conditions, of familiar instructional level text can increase students’ reading speed which can improve comprehension.
Fluency is a child’s ability to read a book or other text with accuracy, at a reasonable rate, and with appropriate expression. Reading fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
An informal assessment of reading fluency, including what the assessment measures, when is should be assessed, examples of questions, and the age or grade at which the assessment should be mastered.
In this special Reading Rockets video series, experts answer real questions from families about reading and writing, and how to support their children at home.
Schools and teachers play an essential role in identifying students with reading difficulties, including dyslexia. This article offers a 5-step framework for identifying reading difficulties and determining if a student is eligible for special education services under IDEA — including the role of RTI, cognitive processing tests, and other statewide assessments and curriculum-based measures.
Inspire young readers to practice every day. Hosted by Deborah Norville, this episode explores the ability to decode quickly and achieve fluency — and how early testing and intervention can help struggling readers.
