How do I support students’ fluency development?

We know what fluency is and why it is important, so let's shift our thinking to “How?” Let's discuss some best practices that support fluency.

David Liben, a nationally known reading expert, shares four key principles for supporting students with fluency in his 2016, "Building Reading Fluency":

Principle #1: Students must have sufficient practice with a variety of texts.

Principle #2: Students need to hear fluent reading modeled.

Principle #3: Students need repeated practice reading a text.

Principle #4: Students need feedback on their reading.

Liben shares that these principles can and should be embedded into instruction. In his book, Know Better, Do Better, Liben gives examples of strategies that teachers can use which incorporate these principles, which include:

Choral Reading
Paired/Partner Reading
Repeated Reading
Fluency Development Lesson
Echo Reading

To build familiarity with these, let's explore some strategies!

Your Task

What is the teacher doing?
What are the students doing?
How does this strategy address the core principles of improving fluency?
How might you use these when tutoring?

In addition to the strategies above, there is one more tool called the Fluency Tasks that you can utilize. Read about this strategy below.

Resource Spotlight: Fluency Packets

Fluency Packets from Achieve the Core are short passages that range from 2nd to 12th grade and can be used in addition to school texts. Check out this resource on the Achieve the Core page by clicking here.

A Note of Caution About Supporting Fluency

At times, supporting students with fluency strategies will be a just-right support for increasing automaticity, expression, and rate. However, other times you might notice that the student is still lacking accuracy. In this case, their fluency needs might be identifying an underlying decoding issue. These students need support with decoding to support their word knowledge and may not benefit from fluency practice until the underlying issue is supported!

^{Liben, D. and Paige, D. D. (2016, October 28). Building Reading Fluency: Four classroom strategies that can help build fluent readers. Retrieved from https://achievethecore.org/aligned/building-reading-fluency/}