Reading fluency: what it is and how children build it
Fluency is the bridge between sounding words out and understanding what you read, and it is often what separates children who read easily from those who struggle.
Plenty of children in the early school years can sound out almost any word, yet still read slowly and haltingly. That's when fluency needs work. Here is what fluency is, why it matters so much and what helps.
What is reading fluency?
Fluency is usually described as three connected parts:
- Accuracy: reading the words correctly.
- Rate: reading at a steady pace, without stopping to sound out each word.
- Prosody: reading with stress, pauses and intonation that suit the text, so it sounds like speech.
Speed isn't the goal in itself. A child who rattles off words without understanding isn't reading fluently. But a steady pace is a sign that words are being recognised automatically, and that is where the gain lies.
Why fluency matters for comprehension
According to the Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tunmer, 1986), comprehension rests on two things: decoding and language comprehension. If decoding takes all of a child's effort, little is left for understanding. A child who labours over every word has often forgotten the start of the sentence by the time they reach the end.
When words come automatically, attention is freed up. The child can follow the story, notice when something doesn't make sense and go back. Fluency also makes reading less tiring, and children who read more easily tend to read more, which gives them more practice.
English is harder to decode than many languages
Languages differ in how closely spelling follows sound. Finnish, Italian and Swedish are fairly transparent: once you know the letter sounds, most words can be sounded out. English is much less so. Think of though, through and tough, or the many ways to spell the same sound.
That has consequences. A well-known comparison of European languages (Seymour, Aro and Erskine, 2003) found that children learning English took noticeably longer to master basic decoding than children learning more regular languages. In transparent languages, reading difficulties show up mainly as slow reading rather than inaccurate reading. In English, accuracy remains a bigger part of the picture for longer.
So for English-speaking children, fluency work goes hand in hand with continued phonics: learning the spelling patterns and the common irregular words. Fluency practice builds on decoding; it doesn't replace it.
How to practise fluency
The most studied method is repeated reading. The child reads the same short passage aloud several times, ideally to someone listening. A 2004 meta-analysis (Therrien) found a clear improvement in fluency from this method. A 2017 meta-analysis (Lee and Yoon) found large effects for students with reading disabilities.
The picture isn't completely clear-cut. A stricter 2014 meta-analysis (Galuschka et al.), which only included randomised trials with children and adolescents with reading difficulties, could not confirm a reliable effect of fluency training. It rested on just five comparisons. The firmest support there was for phonics instruction. The fair conclusion: repeated reading is reasonable and well tried, but decoding has to be in place first.
What you can do at home:
- Pick a short text your child can read with some effort.
- Read it aloud yourself first, so they hear how it should sound.
- Have your child read it aloud three or four times, over one or several days.
- Talk about what happened in the text, so understanding stays part of it.
- Move on to a new text once the old one feels easy.
Some families time the reading to show progress. Some children love this; others find it stressful. If you do it, compare your child only with themselves, and never let speed come before reading correctly.
How Pagoo practises fluency
In Pagoo, your child reads aloud one word or a few words at a time while the app listens. It keeps a running fluency score based on how accurately and how quickly your child reads. When reading flows, more words are shown at once. When it's hard, fewer words appear, with wider spacing between the letters, and long words are always shown alone. It's a way of keeping the text at the right level, though this approach hasn't been tested in controlled studies.
Practise reading aloud with Pagoo
Pagoo shows one word at a time and listens as your child reads aloud. The stories are free.
How Pagoo worksSources
- Gough, P. B. & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1).
- Seymour, P. H. K., Aro, M. & Erskine, J. M. (2003). Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. British Journal of Psychology, 94(2).
- Therrien, W. J. (2004). Fluency and comprehension gains as a result of repeated reading: a meta-analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 25(4).
- Lee, J. & Yoon, S. Y. (2017). The effects of repeated reading on reading fluency for students with reading disabilities: a meta-analysis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50(2).
- Galuschka, K. et al. (2014). Effectiveness of treatment approaches for children and adolescents with reading disabilities: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. PLoS ONE, 9(2).