Why Fluency is Important

Many might wonder why fluency is important for high school students, but it is one of those make-or-break skills.

The Four Components

There are four components to fluent reading.

1. Phrasing and punctuation. Grouping words together in clusters of meaning by phrases, clauses, and punctuation.
2. Expression (prosody). This is the emotion of the sentence.
3. Accuracy. The words are read correctly, not replaced with other words.
4. Rate. This is reading with a flowing speed with some pauses for phrasing and punctuation, as well as emphasis through expression. It is NOT speed reading.

[Reading Rockets on Understanding and Assessing Fluency]

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Why teach fluency?

1. Reduction of cognitive load. There will be some intrinsic complexity in any new reading. By helping students build skills in sentence structure, accuracy, and expression, we help them free up their minds for the new learning [Do More With Less Using Cognitive Load Theory]
2. Support comprehension. Have you ever found yourself reading slowly and drifting away from the page only to forget what you just read? Without an adequate rate, the same thing happens to students, especially as sentences and readings get longer. Short-term memory plays an important role in reading comprehension.
3. Include all students. Fluency is not a sign of intelligence; it is a sign that your fluency muscle has been exercised. Not all students get the same opportunities in this regard. In fact, students with greater oral language development and reading experiences at a young age are the ones with the advantage. From there, the privilege compounds. Once students with less fluency arrive at school, they get fewer opportunities. They are pulled out of general instruction, read to more, and given simpler texts.
4. The students want it. Time and again, when talking with students who read less fluently than their peers, they have told me they long to read more fluently. They don’t like their homework taking longer than it does their peers. While AI has arrived to provide a shortcut for students, I’d rather they got the skills.

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How to teach fluency

Fluency is so difficult to prioritize in high school. For one, students are supposed to “be fluent” by then. We all know that it’s not the case for everybody. There are students with IEPs, English learners, and non-labeled students who all could benefit from inclusion through fluency.

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