Reading Fluency Analysis

Increasing Reading and Literacy Rates with Fluency For students to experience full comprehension of what they are reading they must have obtained the skill of fluency in reading. According to the article, “Assessing Reading Fluency” there are three keys to reading fluency that students must master to have good comprehension they are automaticity, accuracy and prosody. These three keys must connect and build off each other making fluency in reading multidimensional. Accuracy is a reader’s ability to identify words correctly the first time without assistance, automaticity is a reader’s ability to read words without the use of extra resources such as teacher or parent assistance or slowly sounding out words, the ability to use accuracy and automaticity

These assessments must be reliable and valid, and they must also be efficient to teachers who administer them. Therefore, the best types of assessments to gauge student’s reading fluency are quick, easy to offer, and repeated throughout the year. The two types of assessments for accuracy and automaticity discussed in this article are Informal Reading Inventories (IRI) and Curriculum-Based Measurement and Oral Reading Fluency (CBM/ORF.) The fluency assessment for prosody discussed in this article are modeling, coaching feedback and fluency rubrics. IRI’s are used for teachers to assess student’s reading of word lists and passages to see how fluently they read, although most teachers do not like to use IRI’s because they are extremely time consuming especially if there are multiple struggling readers being assessed. Instead teachers often choose to assess student’s accuracy and automaticity using CBM/ORF’s assessments. In CBM/ORF assessments readers are given a grade level text to read orally to the teacher but only for one minute. The teacher will mark any errors made by the reader during the reading and then count the number or correctly read words. This assessment is done so quickly it gives the teachers the chance to assess students using different passages to gauge their reading fluency and this assessment can be done

For teachers to teach reading effectively their lessons should include vocabulary, decoding skills, fluency and comprehension strategies. Using these techniques and strategies taught in class students can make connections to build up their reading comprehension. As we discussed with our first article, students who have better automaticity obtain more cognitive abilities that they can put forth to work with reading comprehension. Therefore, reading fluency, the use of accuracy and automaticity, connects to student’s reading comprehension. A student’s reading success depends of their reading