What is reading fluency? If you are like most parents, you aren't sure what fluency is. You might even be confusing "reading fluency" with fluency with the English language. This is not what it means. The research behind No Child Left Behind -- "The Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read" -- found that the five key areas in learning to read are phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency. Fluency?

Fluency surprised many people when it made this list, since many of us did not have fluency practice when we learned to read. So, what exactly is fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read text accurately and quickly. Fluency bridges phonics or word decoding and comprehension. Comprehension is understanding what has been read. Fluency is a set of skills that allows readers to rapidly decode text while maintaining high comprehension.

A first benchmark for fluency is being able to "sight read" some words. Children learn to recognize at sight the most common words in written English. These words are known as Dolch words, sight words, or high frequency words. Instant reading of these words allow children to read and understand text more quickly. Also, many of these words don't follow the rules of phonics, so they need to be memorized. For example, try sounding out these words: one, was, if, even, or the.*
Parents assist with fluency when they read aloud to children. Once children are reading at first to second grade level, exercises with timed reading also help children improve their reading speed. This type of exercise is demanding of parents and instructors since it requires active involvement.
Software and online reading programs also provide great opportunities for children to follow along in the text as the program reads aloud and for timed readings. Try an example of a read-along story used by Time4Learning in our demos. With Time4Learning, these fluency skills are taught and reinforced in a number of ways.