How to improve fluency in reading

How to Improve Reading Fluency for Better Comprehension | Scholastic

You’ve spent years reading storybooks, store signs, and cereal boxes to your child. But now that they're learning to read out loud by themselves, story time might feel like new territory. When your growing reader furrows their brow with every word and stumbles through most sentences, there are certain steps you can take to set them up for lifelong reading success.

Reading fluency is the ability to read out loud accurately, at a good pace (not too slow or too fast), and with expression. “Although it’s typically measured in school when children start reading on their own, such as at the end of first grade, reading fluency is something you can start working on with them even before then,” says Helen Maniates, Ph.D., associate professor of teacher education at the University of San Francisco.

And it certainly pays to, because reading skills can help your child get more out of every subject in school. “Reading fluency contributes to reading comprehension,” says Maniates. “When children read slowly, don’t pay attention to punctuation, or struggle with particular words, they lose track of the ideas in the text.” Set your child up for academic success with these easy — and fun! — reading approaches.  

1. Show them your own fluent reading.

The more often your child hears fluent reading, the more likely they are to pick it up. “Start by reading a paragraph or a full page from a book, and then ask your child to read it,” says Brook Sawyer, Ph.D., an associate professor focusing on language and literacy development at the College of Education at Lehigh University. “When you provide that model, it’s an opportunity for the child to get familiar with the story, understand the pacing, and then mimic you.”

As you model, channel your high school drama class: Read with exuberant, Oscar-worthy expression and pause at the appropriate times (at commas, periods, etc.) to demonstrate the cadence of our language. It’s also helpful to play audiobooks in the car to squeeze in extra modeling time when you’re on the go, says Sawyer.

2. Teach your child how to track words.

If you’ve ever learned a new language, you know how difficult it can be to decipher where one word ends and the next begins when listening to a conversation. Your little learner might feel the same way when they try to follow along during story time. That’s where tracking — or running your finger under words as you read them — comes in handy. You can track while you’re reading to your child, or ask them to track when they're reading out loud.

“When kids are first learning to read, it’s really important for them to touch each word to understand the correspondence between the spoken and written language,” says Maniates. “It’s a stepping-stone strategy. Eventually, they’ll be able to tackle larger phrases without reading word by word.” To make tracking words more fun for your child, equip them with plastic Martian or witch fingers!

3. Try choral reading together.

Not to worry: No singing skills required! Choral reading simply means you read a story out loud, and ask your child to read along with you at the same pace. This helps them understand what fluent reading feels like, and gives them the chance to practice it themselves at your pace, says Sawyer. It’s OK if you’re a tiny bit ahead of them — just be sure to pick a book that they can already read themselves. That way, they're working on pacing and accuracy rather than decoding new words.   

4. Focus on sight words.

You may notice that your child struggles with certain words like “walk” or “house,” also known as sight words. “These are words that are not decodable by sounding them out phonetically,” says Maniates. “They often overlap with high-frequency words, which are those that appear very often in children’s texts.” When your child memorizes what these words look like and can instantly recognize them, they won’t have to spend valuable reading time (and brainpower!) trying to sound them out.

Turn teaching sight words into a game: Spell the words out with magnetic letters; write them on a large piece of paper and ask your child to splat the correct word with a fly swatter when you say it; or use activity packs to help them easily learn them anywhere.

5. Recruit a friendly audience.

Just like us grown-ups, kids are more likely to fumble over their words when they feel nervous or uncomfortable. Set up an inviting stage for them to practice reading stories out loud by creating an audience out of their favorite stuffed animals or recruiting your family pet to listen along. “Some kids really don’t like to read in front of other people, either because they feel shy or feel pressure around it,” says Sawyer. “Start by reading a story together, and then for extra practice, set up a pretend audience that they can read out loud for.”

Eventually, this might also help your child read with more expression. “Reading out loud is almost like a performance, because you’re thinking about your voice, the volume, the pitch, the tone, and you might even be making facial expressions or gestures,” says Maniates. “We want kids to do this when they’re young because that’s how they’ll internalize stories when they read silently to themselves later on.”

6. Record, evaluate, and repeat!

Every so often, when your child is reading out loud, record a passage and then listen to it together. You might celebrate that they read on pace, then record it a second time while aiming for more expression. “Set a specific goal for the session, and decide together what you want to do a little better,” says Sawyer. Just be sure to make it a relaxed setting (this is something you can do in jammies and on the sofa!) and focus on the positive strides your child is making.

It's also a good time to incorporate texts that are easy for your child to read. “Parents are often concerned with getting their kids ahead in reading, but when they’re struggling, going back to easier texts can be really helpful,” says Maniates. “It builds confidence and consolidates their skills so they can expand upon them.” 

Shop books that build fluency skills below! You can find all books and activities at The Scholastic Store.  

How to improve reading fluency

PSPKK123October 3, 2022 •  Leave a Comment

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Are you wondering how to improve reading fluency? You’re in the right place! This post is the first in a four-part series all about building fluency.

Do you have students who struggle with reading fluency?

Maybe they read in a stilted, word-by-word fashion.

Maybe they read accurately, but ooooh so slowly.

Or maybe you know readers who trip over words. To them, reading is awkward and painful.

I personally know a reader (right in my own house) who reads automatically and with little stumbling. But he readslikethiswithoutabreath. I have to remind him to read with expression, to pay attention to punctuation, and to read with inflection in his voice.

All of these students need to improve their reading fluency.

But what does reading fluency even mean?

Before we get started listing ways to build fluency, we need to nail down a definition.

Most definitions of fluency include mention of accuracy, rate, and expression. But the authors of Reading Fluency take it just a step further.

“We define fluency as reasonable accurate reading, at an appropriate rate, with suitable expression, that leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation to read.”

Jan Hasbrouck & Deb Glaser, in Reading Fluency

Did you catch that last part? Fluent reading leads to deep comprehension and motivation to read.

Sounds great!

But how do we get there?

8 Ways to build reading fluency

If you’re wondering what on earth phonemic awareness has to do with fluency, here’s the deal. Phonemic awareness (the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds, or phonemes, in words) is essential for success in decoding words. Since fluency is all about being automatic with word recognition, we’ve got to teach the skills that will get us to automaticity.

(The above picture is from my Phonemic Awareness Activities pack.)

Research has told us again and again that students benefit from direct and structured phonics instruction. When we combine phonemic awareness with phonics, we are equipping our students to tackle unfamiliar words that could interrupt their fluency.

(In fact, if a student scores below benchmark on an oral reading fluency test, the first step is to give a phonics assessment to see if a lack of phonics skills is impeding progress. You can find my free phonics assessment here.)

3 – Teach students to read irregular high frequency words.

While most words contain at least some graphemes (letter or letter combinations that represent phonemes) that are regular, some words include patterns that must be learned by heart. For example, in the word the, the final vowel sound has an unexpected spelling. In the word said, the ai has an unexpected pronunciation.

When teaching these irregular words, it’s important to remember that students learn them just like they learn any other word – and not through whole word memorization. Instead of drilling these as whole words, we can call attention to the parts that are regular and those that are not. (Check out my set of 30 free high frequency word lessons and books to see how this is done.)

After introducing words in this way, it’s perfectly appropriate to do flash card practice. Hasbrouck and Glaser (2019) recommend the following procedure:

• Students write each word on the front of an index card (or the teacher may do this in advance).
• Students trace the letters while saying them and reading the word.
• On the back, students write a sentence using the word and/or draw a quick picture to help them recall the word. (The teacher may do this as well.)
• The cards can then be put on a ring or a recipe box for students to use for daily practice.
• When students practice the words, they can sort them according to their speed under pictures of a dog, rabbit, and turtle. The dog pile gets words that are read quickly and automatically. The rabbit pile gets words that are read with some hesitation. The turtle pile gets words that are unknown, read incorrectly, or read after several seconds. Students keep practicing until all cards get to the dog pile. (For more ways to use these flash cards, check out Reading Fluency, p. 81-82. Such a useful book!)

When teachers don’t make daily read alouds a routine, I think the only reason must be that they aren’t aware of the countless benefits of reading aloud to our students.

I won’t go off on a tangent here, but this quote from Tim Rasinski (2010) is well worth sharing:

“Clearly, read aloud builds interest in reading, but its benefits do not end there. Read aloud helps you achieve three important goals with your students: it improves comprehension and vocabulary, and builds motivation” (p. 46).

Here’s one more benefit: reading aloud provides a wonderful model of fluent reading.

This simply means reading aloud alongside our students. As Rasinski (2010) puts it, “oral reading can be used as a scaffolding tool to ease the transition from modeling to independence” (p. 67).

• Choral reading – groups of students (or even the whole class) read the same text aloud in unision
• Paired reading – This research-based approach is not exactly the same as partner reading or buddy reading. In paired reading, a more proficient reader supports a less able reader by reading together chorally; the more proficient reader adjusts his/her volume and support as the other reader becomes more confident. The reader signals when the more proficient reader should read more loudly or bow out altogether.
• Audio recorded reading – Listening to an audio recording of a text will help build fluency only if the listener is reading along. Students can make great gains in fluency if they keep listening and reading along until they can read the text independently.
  

Our goal is for students to read one text several times so that they can read it fluently – with few errors, at an appropriate rate, with proper expression, and good comprehension.

I’m surprised when I see people question the value of repeated reading in large Facebook groups devoted to the science of reading. The truth is that we’ve had decades of research that show its value.

Research has, in fact, found that rereading a familiar passage not only leads to improvement on that particular passage, but fluency gains also transfer to the reading other passages.

You may be familiar with the concept of timed repeated reading – in which students read a passage multiple times until they achieve a desired rate. This is a powerful intervention that is best suited for students who fit this criteria:

• Words Correct Per Minute scores are more than ten words below the 50th percentile on the Hasbrouck & Tindal ORF (Oral Reading Fluency) norms when they read grade-level or instructional-level text.
• Reading is slow but accurate.
• Decoding of individual words is also slow but accurate.
• Phonemic awareness is well developed.
• Comprehension is adequate or good.

(Source: Reading Fluency, by Hasbrouck & Glaser)

When doing timed repeated readings, always make it a point to also talk about the text. Reading fluently is not all about speed!

Later in this series I’ll walk you through the Fluency Development Lesson, in which teachers support students as they learn to read a short passage or poem with fluency. The FDL only takes about 15 minutes a day.

If you have more time, and you want to help all children achieve fluency with grade-level text, consider FORI (Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction).

Here’s a general overview of FORI:

• Monday – The teacher introduces the text and reads it while the class follows along; the teacher leads a discussion that focuses on comprehending the text.
• Tuesday – The teacher and students echo read the story; comprehension instruction is infused throughout; students take the text home and read it to a friend or family member
• Wednesday – Teacher and students choral-read the text; students who need extra practice read it again at home.
• Thursday – Students partner-read the text; students who need extra practice read it again at home.
• Friday – Students complete extension activities to broaden comprehension.

I’ll be honest – I think I’d be ready to chuck that text out the window after all this time with it, so I’m more a fan of WIDE FORI, which introduces new texts on Thursday and Friday.

(Source: Developing Fluent Readers, by Kuhn & Levy)

Timed repeated reading can be a great motivator for struggling readers who watch their performance improve during their sessions.

But repeated reading, while beneficial to all students, can be less than motivating if we go about it the wrong way. Thankfully, we can make repeated reading interesting and engaging for all students when we make it authentic.

When repeated reading is done for the purpose of rehearsal for a performance, we can get everyone on board.

Students can reread texts multiple times as they prepare to perform in any of these ways:

• Reader’s Theater or partner plays (pictured above)
• Book talks
• Reading aloud to younger students
• Recording books for younger students
• Reading poetry aloud

Whew – that was a lot! And it was just the first post in our series!

Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks:

 Part 1 Coming October 24 Coming October 31 Coming November 7

References

Hasbrouck, J. & Glaser, D. (2019). Reading fluency. Benchmark Education Company.

Kuhn, M. & Levy, L. (2015). Developing fluent readers. The Guilford Press

Rasinski, T. (2010). The fluent reader. Scholastic.

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Filed Under: Science of reading, Fluency, Structured literacy Tagged With: third grade, kindergarten, first grade, second grade

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How to increase the speed of a child's reading

Various techniques for quickly working with text are increasingly of interest to modern parents. Speed ​​reading allows a child to get acquainted with a whole page of text in a matter of seconds, which is very useful both in childhood, while he is in school, and in adulthood. But how to increase the speed and quality of reading and ensure that the student understands and remembers what he read?

Speed ​​reading for children

Since childhood, a modern person is surrounded by such volumes of information that it was difficult to imagine even 100-200 years ago. The Internet alone is an endless repository of knowledge, where you can find the answer to almost any question in e-books, articles and topics on various forums. It is the abundance of textual information that has appeared in recent decades that is pushing parents to teach their children the technique of speed reading.

In the Internet or bookstores you can find many different speed reading manuals from famous authors - Shamil Akhmadullin, Sergey Zotov, Oleg Andreev. Teaching fast reading using these manuals can really bring visible results, but the desired effect can be achieved if classes using these methods are conducted by experienced teachers. In many ways, the low efficiency of self-study is due to the fact that parents do not pay due attention to the basic skills of the baby, which he must possess even before he begins to learn to read quickly.

Parents are not always able to evaluate the quality of their child's work with the text, as they evaluate it by any one property: reading speed, ability to read whole words, ability to understand, remember and retell what is read. But in order to understand whether the child is ready to learn to read quickly, you need to consider in detail each of the listed qualities. Let's talk about what a child should be able to start learning speed reading.

How to improve your reading speed

Speed ​​reading technique can be mastered even by a first-grader, if he has basic basic skills, including:

• reading speed of 60 words per minute. Usually, kids reach this level of proficiency in working with text by about 1-2 grades of school.
• absence of speech defects. At preschool age, babies often do not pronounce some complex sounds, so it is not recommended to learn speed reading too early.
• the ability to clearly express their thoughts. Possession of oral speech directly affects the quality of acquaintance with the text - on reproduction and understanding of what is read.
• the ability to retell the read text, viewed cartoon. This ability indicates that the student is closely following the narrative and remembers the events described in it. And this means that when he begins to study speed reading, he will not have problems understanding the text.

Not only the basic skills of a student matter - in order to successfully learn speed reading, he must be interested in literature and love books. If a student categorically does not like to read, then he will not show the proper motivation to study this technique, which means that the expected effect from the classes will not be achieved. Therefore, parents should pay special attention to educating the child's love of literature.

If the child wants to learn to read fast on his own and has the required level of skills, then he can start learning speed reading. Let's talk about how you can increase your reading speed with the help of various exercises.

Exercises to increase reading speed

There are many author's methods that differ from each other. But most of them include the following exercises to increase the speed and improve the quality of reading:

• deal with Schulte tables. They have many different options, but are more often presented in the form of tables measuring 5 by 5 cells, each of which contains a non-repeating number from 1 to 25. The person performing the exercise needs to sequentially find with his eyes each of the numbers, starting from one and then ascending. This task perfectly trains peripheral vision.
• line read. To complete this exercise, you need to close each line you read with a bookmark or ruler, continuing to read the next one. So the student can get rid of regression - from the habit of returning to the part already read.
• read aloud through the word. Perfectly trains attention and fluent perception of the text. If you often read the text through the word, you will be able to improve the quality of understanding of the material when reading quickly.
• read randomly moving text across the screen. Allows you to expand the angle of view, improve concentration and increase the speed of the brain's reaction to the next part of the task.
• read at the speed of the timer. It is important to try not only to quickly read the text, but also to try to remember and understand what you read well.
• read to a rhythmic sound. Teaches to suppress internal articulation and read more carefully, without being distracted by extraneous stimuli. It is better if the rhythm is created by the child himself, tapping his finger or pencil on the surface of the table - then the effectiveness of this exercise will be higher.

The listed exercises are only a small part of the tasks that you need to perform to improve your writing skills. But are they enough to significantly affect the speed and quality of perception of textual information?

Time-honored effective techniques

Speed ​​reading exercises and activities really help improve your writing skills. But we must remember that even the most useful of them will not cope with this task if you do not alternate them with other tasks. It is important to make training consistent, subject to a specific program, in order to gradually improve the child's ability to read and consolidate the knowledge gained.

It is also worth noting that learning to speed read is a lengthy process that can take from several months to one or two years, depending on the initial level of the student's skills. Parents do not always manage to regularly engage with their child throughout this time and select a variety of exercises for him in order to diversify his abilities. Because of this, self-training often does not bring the desired result. Therefore, parents are interested in various speed reading courses, thanks to which the student will be able to learn how to read quickly and memorize what they read well.

The Liberica program is a time-tested method of teaching speed reading with proven effectiveness. In such classes, the child will be able to gradually master all the necessary topics, consolidate their knowledge and learn to read up to a thousand words per minute. The student will retain such a high level of skills forever, which means that such abilities will be useful to him not only in childhood, but also in adulthood.

5 Ways to Increase Reading Speed ​​- T&P

Google estimates that there are more than 130 million books in the world today. Not all of them really deserve attention, however, a human life is not enough to read only the masterpieces of world literature, not to mention scientific, educational and other printed materials.

Development of peripheral vision

One of the main tools for speed reading is peripheral or side vision. It is carried out by the peripheral areas of the retina and allows you to see and perceive a word or even a whole line instead of several letters.

The classic way to train peripheral vision is to work with the Schulte table. Such a table is a field divided into 25 squares: five horizontally and five vertically. A number is inscribed in each square, in total - from 1 to 25, in random order. The student's task is to sequentially find all the numbers in ascending or descending order, while looking exclusively at the central square.

The Schulte table can be printed on paper, but today there are dynamic online generators and downloadable computer and mobile trainings, including those with a built-in timer. Those who use extended speed reading training programs are advised to “warm up” with the Schulte table before training. If you wish, you can switch from black and white 5x5 tables to more complex versions: for example, with colored fields.

Suppression of subvocalization

Another of the cornerstone principles of teaching speed reading is the rejection of subvocalization: pronouncing words in the head and micro-movements of the tongue and lips. A person is able to pronounce on average no more than 180 words per minute - and it is no coincidence that this number is the maximum in ordinary reading. However, when the speed of perception of the text increases, it becomes more difficult to pronounce words, and subvocalization begins to interfere with the development of a new skill.

There are some simple exercises to suppress mental speaking. For example, while reading, you can press your tongue to the sky, pinch the tip of a pencil with your teeth, or even just put your finger on your lips, as if saying to yourself: “Be quiet. ” There are also techniques in which the pronunciation of words is “knocked off” by chaotic tapping, the sound of a metronome, or music.

Rejection of regressions

Regressions in short reading are returns to already read parts of the text. They arise when the reader is distracted by extraneous thoughts, or if the speed of assimilation of information is too high for the brain to be able to perceive all the information.

The Best Reader tutorial helps you deal with regressions. It is based on the dynamic selection of parts of the text on the page in black. It is difficult for human eyes to make orderly movements without observing anything, and this feature allows you to better focus your eyes on the necessary fragments. When reading a regular book or document on the screen of an electronic device, you can also use a simple trick that we all know from preschool days: swipe the page with your finger. It also helps to get rid of regressions by understanding that further text often makes it possible to fill in all the short information gaps that have arisen in the process of reading.

Attention concentration

Fast reading requires a high concentration of attention. To develop it and not read texts superficially, there are several exercises. For example, you can use a sheet on which the names of colors will be printed in color, but in such a way as to confuse the reader. The word "yellow" will be written in red letters, the word "red" in blue, and so on. For practice, you need to name the color of the ink, not the word that is written on the sheet, and at first it is quite difficult to do.

For another exercise, all you need is a blank sheet of paper and a pen. You need to focus your attention on some subject and not be distracted from it by extraneous thoughts for two or three minutes. Every time extraneous thoughts arise, it is necessary to make a note on the sheet. Over time, there should be fewer such marks, and after that they will disappear altogether.

You can also train your concentration while reading: just count the words in the text. It is important to keep counting exclusively in your mind, without helping yourself with your fingers, tapping your foot, etc. After two or three minutes, you need to stop and check yourself by counting the words without reading them. At first, the first result will differ from the second, but with regular training, the differences between them will quickly become minimal.

Reading whole words

The Spritz application also aims to develop peripheral vision. For training, only one line is used here, on which words with a highlighted red letter in the middle appear at different speeds. In this way, one can learn to perceive words without reading them from beginning to end, but at once in their entirety. This allows you to save up to 80% of the time that is normally spent on eye movements, and increase the reading speed to 500-1000 words per minute.

The official website of the application has a demo version of Spritz, including in Russian. You can choose from 250 to 600 wpm and other languages: English, German, Spanish, and French.

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