Fluency

There are many definitions of fluency, but all seem to include components of accuracy, speed, and prosody. With all of these components, comes comprehension. There are different ways to assess fluency, that can help teachers identify which students are struggling readers. Teachers play an important role in teaching reading fluency by using different techniques such as modeling. All of the readings seemed to touch on the same aspects of fluency, all including accuracy, speed or rate, prosodic reading, and comprehension. 

In her article "One-Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction," Teresa Deeney addresses the use of one-minute fluency measures, but also identifies some problems that come with these specific assessments. She defines fluency with 4 major components: accuracy, rate or speed, prosody, and comprehension. Although these components define fluency, they are not all being assessed. One thing I found to be very interesting was how big of an effect accuracy has on comprehension. If a couple of key words are misread in a text, the whole idea of that text could be inaccurate. I think that happens a lot to students because they get so caught up in trying to read fast that they misread key words in the text, therefore altering their comprehension. Sometimes it becomes difficult to measure all of the components of fluency. One-minute assessments are useful for two things: accuracy and rate, but fluency is more than that. I think that the deeper approaches to fluency assessment are crucial for measuring and improving students' reading fluency. I really liked the idea of including fluency in other assessments, and tying assessment to instruction.

The second article "Creating Fluent Readers," refers to reading fluency as having three components that include: accuracy in word decoding, automatic processing, and prosodic reading. These are very similar to the components of the other article. The article presents different ways to assess each component of fluency and also include helpful instructional strategies that foster fluent reading. I like the idea of assisted readings and repeated readings to help students develop reading fluency. I think it is important to model fluent reading to students, using expression and flow. I also think that repeated readings can be helpful to students, because it allows them to improve their speed, and decoding skills. 

In chapter 4 includes three components of fluency as well, these include: accuracy, speed, and prosody. The book explains that the development of fluency is crucial and should be a major goal in reading instruction. Chapter 4 offers many instructional strategies to help students improve and develop reading fluency. I think it is important to provide students with easy texts and ones they are interesting in to help them develop fluency. I think that providing easy texts of interest will boost their confidence in reading. Similar to the second article, chapter 4 suggests ways to promote fluency by modeling fluent reading by reading with expression and by re-reading. Another way to promote reading fluency is have a word wall in the classroom that contains high-frequency words for the students to refer to. I love the idea of the word wall and hope to use it in my own classroom one day.