Fluency

The chapters and articles assigned explore the important aspects of fluency and look at different measures that can be taken to aid struggling readers and increase fluency for students. Chapter 4 in Classrooms That Work defines fluency as "the ability to read most words in the context quickly and accurately with appropriate expression" (p 49). Through the readings, I learned many important components and ideas about fluency that I might not have explored on my own. For example, the text states that fluency is not something that a person has or doesn't have. Rather, children must work to develop fluency in order to become avid and enthusiastic readers who get pleasure and comprehend information from the reading. Additionally, each of the texts assigned today explicitly state that comprehension is directly related to reading fluency. In fact, Deeney's article includes this in the stated definition of fluency. Deeney says, "Fluency is freedom from word-identification problems that might hinder reading comprehension" (p 440). If a student is spending their time decoding words, they will never comprehend the text. Deeney's article also breaks down the components of fluency as follows: accuracy, rate, and prosody. In understanding these components and how they are related to reading fluency, we as teachers can help students to practice and correct fluency problems. First, teachers must make a commitment to ensure that all students are spending some of their time reading easy text. This will allow readers to read texts that they are interested in, that they have background knowledge of, and that they can recognize approximately 99 percent of the words in. Other things that we can do as teachers is set up a buddy reading program with a kindergarten class, model fluent and expressive reading, and provide opportunities for rereading. Word walls might also be a good idea help your students develop fluency. This will help students to quickly and automatically recognize these words, a skill that is central to reading fluency.
I thought that it was interesting that Deeney looked at one-minute measures so closely. I've seen these types of assessments done in the classroom, but I had never explored the measure so in-depth. The article states that one-minute measures help us to identify students that cannot read accurately and quickly. I had knowledge of this purpose before reading our text. The thing about one-minute measures that I found so intriguing was what teachers should do to get the most out of this type of assessment. Teachers should record students' miscues instead of simply slashing through errors. I thought this was interesting because in my experience with one-minute measures, teachers only slashed through misreads. It seems as though in doing this, teacher miss much information that could be used to help fix issues related to fluency. Rasinski's article touches on this as well and gives another suggestion for assessing matters of fluency. This article explores the pros of having a student read a passage on grade level and teachers judging the quality of the reading using a rubric. This way, the various aspects of reading fluency can be assessed separately. Rasinski also looks at confusing fast with fluent, a problem that is frequently seen in schools. I learned a ton from the articles that we read for today, and I am excited about implementing fluency improvement strategies in my own classroom.