Creating Real Readers: Fluency

Many children can go through the motions of reading but how can we tell when the mechanics of reading turns to enjoyment? One word: Fluency.

The DfE states that “Fluency and enjoyment are the result of careful teaching and frequent practice. Ensuring children become fluent and engaged readers at the very earliest stages also helps avoid the vicious circle of reading difficulty and demotivation that makes later intervention more challenging.”

Children need the basics of reading to be in place in order to reach fluency; the job of the practitioner is to thread two ropes into a child’s toolkit and tighten these skills until fluency is reached. The two foundational threads are: word recognition and language comprehension.

Word recognition is created through the high quality teaching of systematic synthetic phonics, leading from grapheme/phoneme correspondence; to blending; to internally blending; leading to word recognition automaticity. These foundations are built in the early years but it essential it is continued all the way through until phoneme security is achieved.

The language comprehension thread is influenced by many external factors -when a child reaches an educational setting it is essential that they are drenched in language through: quality talk; modelled language; opportunities to communicate with others and through purposefully chosen books. 

Once pupils have these two threads it is time to entwine them – whilst word recognition and language comprehension is being embedded, fluency can be introduced through discussing texts; orally responding to a text through questioning and providing opportunities for pupils to echo read sentences to experience prosody.

 

Fluency occurs at the point when accuracy, reading speed and language comprehension all marry together and switch on the “T.V” in a pupil’s mind. The conjuring up of pictures in the mind is where the enjoyment in reading comes. Our end goal: we want pupils to have a life-long love of reading. 

What can we do in the classroom to support our pupils to become fluent?

• Echo reading texts with pupils is the perfect way for them to experience prosody and reading rate to gain meaning. 

• Allowing repeated re-reading of a text to practise and perform.

• Extended reads – allowing time for pupils to read for sustained periods of time to gain context and immerse themselves into a text.

• Explicit teaching of vocabulary – allowing pupils to be word collectors through: exposure  to new words; teaching the morphology and etymology of words in order for pupils to decipher new words and give pupils opportunities to use new words both orally and in written form to commit them to memory.

• Choose texts that will switch on the T.V – think about having a breadth of genres; texts that will ignite their imagination and books that will hit the perfect challenge point. 

 

Influential reads to support embedding fluency into your curriculum:

                                                

 

EEF – Link to Improving Literacy KS1 

HfL – The Importance of Teaching Fluency

The Wensum Hub has reached capacity for full-funded fluency courses for 2024/25.

We are hoping to continue to fund places for fluency courses in 2025/26, as well as share our brand new DfE approved Fluency Project.

 

Details on how to register your interest will be available later in the year – sign up to our newsletters here.