By Marisa Morales

Reading is a meaning-making process. If we’re not understanding what we’re reading, then we’re not really reading. Fluency is a foundational skill that impacts readers' comprehension. Fluency is not a race; it involves so much more than speed! This blog outlines factors that influence fluency and provides ways to support fluency through book choice and pre-reading activities. 

Identify Students' Fluency Needs

Students struggle with fluency for different reasons. Asking these questions can help pinpoint what area(s) of fluency students need to practice:

• Does their reading sound choppy, staccato, or word by word?
• Do they need to pay attention to punctuation?
• Are they reading too slowly…or too quickly?
• Do they sound monotone when they read?
• Are they comprehending what they read? Are they reading for meaning?

4 Factors that Influence Fluency

It is helpful to consider the following four factors when deciding how to support students’ fluency.

1. Language Structure

Fluent reading is supported by the child’s knowledge of how oral language works because language is rule-governed and predictable. When a student reads: I have a… (in Spanish, Yo tengo un…), the more knowledge they have about this language structure, the easier it is to naturally know the type of word that comes next in their reading.

2. Prior Knowledge

Prior knowledge is the compilation of knowledge stored in a person’s memory about concepts, events, and emotions. Students who have played or watched football are more likely to be successful with books on that topic. Familiarizing with a recurring character builds prior knowledge and motivates students to read more of the series. For example, in Hameray’s Greedy Cat (Gato Goloso) series, students love the predictable antics of the greedy main character.

3. Word Identification

Students need to be able to identify high-frequency words quickly and automatically. These known words serve as footholds in print and free up the students’ energy to work on solving unfamiliar words. Although some believe that high-frequency words don’t exist in Spanish, I would argue that when Spanish readers see words like casa, mamá, está, and fuimos, they need to be able to read the words quickly, by sight, without syllabification. Reading these words quickly and automatically facilitates fluent reading.

4. Phonics

Knowledge of letters and sounds impacts fluency. Children must quickly identify sounds or clusters of sounds (letters) and efficiently combine them to solve unknown words. Students must take words apart quickly, on the run, but only when necessary.

7 Ways to Support Fluency

Here are seven ways to support the factors listed above (language structure, prior knowledge, word ID, and phonics) to help students read fluently. Use these ideas when choosing books for your students and for pre-reading activities. 

1. Select texts written in the same manner as children's speech. Look for books that allow students to read stretches of text using natural language for fluency practice.

2. Select texts for which students have some prior knowledge or for which you can help build background knowledge. Videos, realia, photos, and pictures are all great ways to support students’ understanding of an unfamiliar topic and positively impact their reading fluency.

3. When introducing a book to your students, give them opportunities to hear, say, and see any new language structures they need to use in their reading (especially language structures that are not part of their oral language repertoires).

An example in Spanish can be found in the book El pequeño Daniel. Daniel says, ¡Alto, alto en los cielos, yo volaré! (High, high in the skies, I will fly!). This might be a structure some students do not use in their oral language. In the book orientation, students hear you say the phrase, they repeat it several times, and they find it in the text (hear, say, see).

4. Look for simple structures that lend themselves to phrasing that students will repeatedly encounter. For example, practicing the repeated adjective phrase sneaky fox before reading The Fox, The Lion, and The Deer  fosters fluent phrasing.

5. Point out and remind students of the role of punctuation. Below is a page from the fable The Tortoise and the Rabbit (La Tortuga y el Conejo). This is an example of an excellent opportunity to practice and discuss how commas, quotation marks, and exclamation points impact how our reading sounds.

6. For students who struggle to read high-frequency words quickly and fluently, ask them to locate a few high-frequency words in the text before the reading.

7. Students can’t practice fluency with books that are too hard. Easy and instructional texts provide practice in orchestrating the complex behaviors necessary to become a good reader. Children need many, many opportunities to practice reading at their independent level.

It’s important to remember that not all students need every scaffold mentioned above. Different students need different types of support. If we keep the complexity of fluency in mind as we select and introduce books to our students, we can tailor our instruction to meet the varying needs of our fluent and not-so-fluent readers.

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Looking for more books for independent reading? Hameray's Classroom Libraries are the perfect way to enrich K–2 classrooms with meaningful, content-rich fiction and nonfiction. Our library sets cover a wide-range of genres and high-interest topics. They include original stories by Joy Cowley, fables, traditional tales, and captivating nonfiction. Click here to learn about classroom libraries in English, Spanish, or dual language sets. 

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Marisa Morales has been teaching for over 25 years. She has spent the last 14 years as a Reading Recovery/Descubriendo la Lectura Teacher Leader in Washington State. Marisa started her teaching career as a K-5 Special Education teacher and also taught bilingual first grade for several years. She has a passion for teaching struggling readers with a special interest in students learning to read in Spanish.