Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read with accuracy, rate, and prosody. Fluency is great to use in reading because it is a bridge between comprehension and word recognition. In order to comprehend you have to read fluently.Fluency is the key ingredient in successful reading instruction.
Practice makes Perfect!
Fluency does not come easy and your student may be struggling, but do not let that discourage your student to believe that they cannot read. They can read, all they need help on is decoding and we will be reading fluently in no time. Know that reading fluently takes TIME. It develops gradually and won't happen overnight. It requires PRACTICE…regular practice. Just like learning how to walk or drive or anything else, regular practice is critical. Which is why it is good to practice at school as well as at home. Below i will give some activities that will help increase the students fluency.
Three components of fluency
Rate-This is the speed at which the child reads.
Accuracy- The students ability to read words in a
text.
Prosody- The students ability to read with feeling or
expression.Some activities that can be done in the classroom to increase students prosody is to do readers theatre, or sing songs with text in them, or do echo reading with them.
Punctuation is not apart of the three components of fluency but it does fall into the category of prosody because it does deal with expression in the sentence the student may be expressing.
Accuracy- The students ability to read words in a
text.
Prosody- The students ability to read with feeling or
expression.Some activities that can be done in the classroom to increase students prosody is to do readers theatre, or sing songs with text in them, or do echo reading with them.
Punctuation is not apart of the three components of fluency but it does fall into the category of prosody because it does deal with expression in the sentence the student may be expressing.
Fluency Instruction
As the teacher i need to be able to teach your student how to build up their fluency. I feel there are some components involved with this which are...1) to model fluent reading because in order for them to learn fluency the teacher needs to teach it, for example, the teacher may do a read-aloud in the class which consists of the teacher reading to the class. 2) Oral instruction during reading will help tremendously with the student to give them guided instruction during this time. 3) Give them ways to practice and perform their fluency such as readers theatre where they can act out the scences in a book they are reading at the time as well as having the students do independent reading to give them the opportunity to read on their own once they feel they can read fluently with a little bit of guidance if needed. 4) Give the students word activities to help build their accuracy so they won't come to any bumps on the road with big vocabulary words while reading.
Things to do when reading with prosody (expression) :
I hope this picture helps the students how to deal with prosody while reading. This may help the parent as well at home with their student to build their fluency. Enjoy!