Page 29 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

• Use performance data from progress monitoring to identify students who need more
practice, isolate the specific objectives they need to work with, and determine the most
effective reading instructional methods to use.

Fluency

Lesson Objective

In the pages to follow, we’ll begin our discussion of fluency as it pertains to learning to read. The
discussion will help define fluency in this context and touch on some of its hallmarks: speed,
comprehension, and expression.

Previously Covered

In the previous sections, we looked at print awareness and how students begin to invest the printed
word with meaning. We also discussed the initial stages of reading, ideas about assessing a student’s
progress, and some methods to build vocabulary.

What Does Fluency Mean?

When considering the meaning of fluency, it helps to think about the term second nature. Whereas
first nature would apply to innate knowledge—that is, horse sense—second nature would apply to
acquired knowledge that has been practiced to the extent that it, too, appears innate, or automatic.

Those who spend a great deal of time typing may be able to type accurately without really paying any
attention to what they’re doing. It is then possible to devote all of one’s conscious brain power to the
task of composing the ideas to be typed. Of course, if a typist has not taken the time to learn
keyboarding, then no amount of hunting and pecking will result in typing that is both accurate and
automatic. Therefore, the person who hunts and pecks will probably never achieve fluency in typing.

The most common usage of fluency—in reference to the ease with which one speaks a language—is
also conceptually similar to reading fluency. If one does not consciously have to translate ideas from
her native language to the language she is currently using, then she is able to think in her nonnative
tongue. For her, ideas exist in both of the languages she knows. The words appear in her head both
accurately and automatically. She is, therefore, fluent in that language.

It is instructive to note that bilingual speakers who use only one language for an extended period of
time may complain of being out of practice in the other language. For speaking other languages,
typing, riding a bicycle, playing a harmonica, or any other acquired ability, a prolonged lapse in
practice will adversely affect one’s ability to accurately and automatically perform the hitherto fluent
skill. So it is with reading.

Reading fluency is the sum of reading rate and accuracy. Accuracy, in turn, is directly related
to prosody. Prosody—the appropriate inflection or expression with which a student reads—is directly
related to comprehension, which is synonymous with understanding. If we were to express all these
relationships in a series of formulas, it might look like this:

R + A = F, where R=rate, A=accuracy, and F=fluency; and
F ∝ C—that is, F (fluency) is directly proportional to C (comprehension); and
C ∝ P—that is, C (comprehension) is directly proportional to P (prosody)