What is Reading Fluency and Why Is It Important?
Successful reading requires readers to process connected text and comprehend it. Reading fluency is the reader’s ability to appropriately read text in order and understand textual meaning. There are features of fluency that lead to improved comprehension. They include: • reading words accurately and automatically so that they do have to take time away from understanding a sentence or story to figure words out • reading words correctly – Readers must be able to “sound out” or decode the words in a text accurately with minimal errors. • reading words smoothly and with ease – Readers need to spend as little time on decoding as possible to assist in comprehension. Students should increase their bank of words and word chunks with repeated exposure they are able to recognize by sight. Reading word by word and hestitating on challenging words impedes comprehension. • reading with expression, prosody, and attending to punctuation – Readers need to pay attention to punctuation (periods, commas,
