How Is Fluency Usually Taught?
Some 20 years ago, Allington (1983) argued that fluency was a neglected reading goal. To some extent, this seems still to be true today. However, if fluency is taught, the following strategies seem to be the most widely accepted: • Modeling Children must know what fluent reading sounds like in order to be able to read fluently (Clark, 1995). However, many children do not hear models of fluent oral reading and, indeed, may often hear dysfluent reading when, for example, they listen to peers during activities such as round-robin reading and paired reading. Listening to teachers and other proficient readers (including that narrators on talking books) can therefore be helpful to children who need to improve their oral reading fluency. However, the provision of models is unlikely to improve reading fluency unless several additional conditions are met. Namely, in order to read with increased rate, accuracy, and prosody, students may need the opportunity to discuss the features of fluent read
