Content area
Full Text
Is fluency importanti
As a beginning teacher in the early eighties, imagine seeing the word fluency for the first time on your students' report cards. Although you did not receive any instruction on how to teach fluency, you must give your students a fluency grade. You are so unsure of its meaning, you actually have to look the word up in the dictionary because you are too embarrassed to ask a colleague. Well, that teacher was me. I did assign a fluency grade by listening to my students read and judging them as objectively as I could. But what did that matter? If I did not teach fluency, why should I grade it?
I also had a serious misconception regarding fluency and its relation to comprehension; I mistakenly thought fluency had no reflection on a student's comprehension. It was my understanding that as long as a student could read a passage silently and understand it, his or her oral fluency was irrelevant. Many times it was actually painful to listen to a student read aloud; I could not help but think of these readers as "bad" readers. When parents would question me at conferences about fluency, I would tell them not to worry. Oral fluency had little to do with their child's understanding of what they read.
My own observations of these students through the years helped me to realize that I was so wrong about the importance of fluency. Those students who read aloud poorly were the same students who spent so much time decoding words that their comprehension broke down. My ignorance on the subject and fellow teachers' comments about fluency sparked my interest to learn as much as I could about fluency.
I currently teach second grade in a public school system. Since fluency is rarely mentioned in the reading series adopted by our district, teaching fluency is sometimes not considered a priority. Allington (1983) identified fluency as one of most neglected areas of the reading curriculum. I believe that many teachers, even today, do not have a clear picture of what fluency is or how it can be taught. However, beliefs about fluency have changed.
The National Reading Panel (2000) regards fluency as one of the primary components of reading,...