Welcome to a Focus on Fluency!
I have created this website to help teachers and parents understand the importance of fluency in the process of learning to read. You will find both information and ways to increase reading fluency throughout my website.
The site uses Response to Intervention to categorize specific strategies and interventions. Response to Intervention is a multi-tiered approach used to identify and support student learning.
Tier 1 consists of quality classroom instruction implemented in a whole group setting. Students that do not make adequate progress during tier 1 instruction are moved to tier 2 where they receive intervention targeting specific skill weaknesses. If students continue to struggle during tier 2 intervention and do not make adequate progress, they begin to receive tier 3 instruction. Tier 3 instruction targets specific skill deficits in a more individualized fashion.
Reading Fluency
Defining fluency can be challenging, as fluency encompasses every aspect of reading (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen; Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, & Meisinger, 2010; Meisinger, Blook & Hyne, 2010; Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). An encompassing definition is the ability to read fluently, accurately and with prosody by simultaneously decoding and comprehending (Li et al., 2010).
Reading fluency occurs during oral reading, silent sentence reading, reading connected text, and silent paragraph reading (Berninger, Abbott, Trivedi, Olson, Gould, Hiramatsu, Holsinger, McShane, Murphy, Norton, Boyd & Westhaggen, 2010). Those not able to read text fluently are at a great disadvantage (Shaywitz, 2003).