I was speaking with a parent over the weekend and she was saying that her child knows how to read. The problem is bringing him up to speed. He reads 23 words per minute and according to the teacher he should be at 43 words per minute! There is great pressure put on all students to improve and do more than was ever expected before. And, unfortunately, not all students are able to make that jump easily. Everything is moving faster now. Children are expected to learn more in less time.

Why Are Kids Inefficient Readers…And What Would It Take To Fix That?

Usually, little if any time is dedicated to helping children become efficient readers. To be an efficient reader, you need to be able to retrieve words automatically. Reading words automatically requires fluency training and fluency training is typically not part of the school day. Reading fluency and speed is critical to reading success, and a lot of kids are struggling because they have not had any direct fluency training.

Fluency training only takes about 5 minutes a day and is easy for parents to do with their children at home. In fact, in my private practice I do fluency training with my students twice a week and they make tremendous progress.

Let's first understand what reading fluency is. Then I'll explain the time commitment, the research behind fluency, the underlying cause of fluency problems, and the easy to implement solution.

What Is Reading Fluency?

Reading fluency is the ability to retrieve words automatically. Studies also show that slow single word reading leads to poor comprehension and frustration. If you can't read rapidly, you can't hold large pieces of language text in your mind. By the time you finish reading the passage you often forget what the beginning of it was about.

Reading fluency encompasses the speed or rate of reading, as well as the ability to read materials with expression. M. S. Meyer and R. H. Felton (1999) defined fluency as “‘the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly, and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading, such as decoding”.

When you read with fluency you do so without thinking of the reading process. This automatic reading then gives you the ability to comprehend what you have read.

Time Needed to Improve Fluency

Cecil Mercer, a researcher from the University of Florida, published his results from his study Effects of Fluency Intervention for Middle Schoolers with Specific Learning Disabilities in (2000) stating substantial gains in fluency came from daily practice sessions of five or six minutes. The practice consisted of repeated oral reading of various sorts such as letters or words. The key to success was doing the five minutes of oral reading drills over a time period of six to twenty-three months.

Research on Fluency

The importance of reading fluency has been noted for many years. In fact one of the first reading fluency researches, psychologist William MacKeen Cattell (1886), discovered that you could read a word (like tiger) faster than you can name a picture of a pouncing feline creature!

Cattell was the first person to recognize that we become quite ‘automatic' when we read. Actually, we are more automatic when reading than when speaking. So, learning to read automatically is a huge achievement for our brain. This is a capacity that we have, learning something so well that we can do it almost without thinking.

According to research done by S. Jay Samuels in 2006, “The link between fluency and overall reading proficiency is now well established. Comprehension requires the fluent master of the surface-level aspects of reading.”

Reid Lyon, Ph.D., stated in 1997, "While the ability to read words accurately is a necessary skill in learning to read, the speed at which this is done becomes a critical factor in ensuing that children understand what they read." It is kind of like riding a bike. If you don't ride a bike fast enough, you lose your balance and fall off. If the reader doesn't recognize words quickly enough, the reader often loses the meaning of the text. When reading is slow and labored, the reader just cannot remember what he or she has read or relate the ideas he has read to their own background knowledge.

Underlying Cause of Reading Fluency Problems

There are two causes to reading fluency problems The first and most common cause is when a child knows how to read but they are slow readers. The actual problem is due to visual tracking difficulties. To tell if this is the case, listen to them read aloud. Are they skipping, omitting, or repeating words when they read OR are they mispronouncing them?

Usually when you are a slow reader it is because you are missing bits and pieces when you are reading, so you re-read the text to make it make sense to you. The second cause is that the child is a slow processor - if they read accurately aloud but are slow when they are reading. It takes time for the reader to retrieve the word from their memory bank.

Solution to Reading Fluency Problems

The solution to both of these problems - the skipping & repeating words or the slow processing of the words is the same - reading practice drills that are short in duration that are specifically designed to work on the visual tracking as well as speed and word retrieval in a short time frame. Whatever reading practice drills you choose to use, it is important that the reader is reading from left to right. In other words, practicing reading flash cards or lists of words from top to bottom will help with word retrieval, but it will NOT help visual tracking problems. You need to address the visual tracking in order to create smooth fluent readers.

If you don't read well, you don't want to read. Improving fluency is a critical component to improving reading. As a parent, fluency training is one of the quickest and most important things you can do to help your child be a successful efficient reader. It requires a very small amount of time and minimal expertise. Reading fluency training involves reinforcement rather that teaching your reader a new skill or concept. It lends itself to just following a few simple steps with the program you choose, and, it works. There are reading drills specifically designed to improve reading fluency, phonics, visual processing speed, visual tracking, and visual closure in 5 minutes a day.

Remember, reading fluently is the key to our children's futures. Reading helps children develop vital language skills, opens new worlds to them, and provides entertainment.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET