Fluency: What does IT really mean?

Shared and repeated readings are assumed to reflect influence on increasing oral reading fluency abilities through accuracy, rate, expression, and phrasing. The purpose of the study was to examine how repeated reading increased students’ oral reading scores across the six-dimensions of fluency transferring phonics instruction to oral reading. Specifically, we tested the repeated reading process that focused on improving early fluency skills on 6-7-year-old students in a first grade classroom who were reading at or below grade level expectations and received a score of 2 or below in terms of their oral reading fluency as measured by the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment. The goal was to ascertain a one point gain targeted in the students’ fluency that reflected pausing, phrasing, stress, intonation, rate, and integration of the domains. At the beginning, students’ voices were not reflecting punctuation, poorly phrasing sentences, lacked pitch/tone that implied meaning, and were not integrating fluency skills consistently in their first read of the passage. At the end of the study, students were able to read with some inflection, pause at appropriate places, utilized appropriate phrasing, and stressed necessary words or phrases during their first read. Following the second read, students’ accuracy, rate, and words per minute increased significantly, producing a love of literature and the determination to work hard towards a more “challenging” text. Repeated reading of a text is crucial to students to build the necessary automaticity and comprehension to be a proficient reader