A fluent reading is a reading with precision, rhythm and expressivity. Any program to improve reading fluency has to work on these three aspects. Up to the 4th grade, reading comprehension and fluency are positively correlated. This means that students with good fluency have a good understanding of what they’re reading. From 4th grade onwards, this correlation starts being less intense, and can even become negative in high school. So, starting from 4th grade, there are children whose reading fluency can be adequate and whose reading comprehension can be inadequate, and the other way around.
- REPEATED READING.
This procedure is similar to the one used by athletes. They train by repeating an exercise to improve their time or technique, and they repeat it over and over. It’s proven that reading the same text four or five times helps produce the basic effects of the improvement of reading fluency. This is tedious. To motivate them, it’s good to explain to the students what happens in their brain when they read, and how it can be improved. You teach them to evaluate reading (precision, rhythm, expressivity and comprehension), and the adult practices with them. Once this dominated, you introduce the repeated reading strategy. It’s really useful for the students to read something to their relatives, and to ask all of them to sign it.
- Selection and handing out of the text
- Repeated readings of the text in front of other people like relatives or friends, who sign after the reading.
- Another way is to hand out a text and a number of words per minute they need to read, and ask them to keep reading the text until they achieve that goal.