How Reading Fluency Unlocks Comprehension
This post has been written by Kitty Wenham-Ross
Tl:dr: When it comes to reading, fluency is the golden link between decoding and comprehension.
First, the dry preamble… As with all things in teaching, fluency is a recent buzzword (as it has been before and will be again, inevitably). The (old) government report from March 2024 ‘Telling the Story’ English subject report highlighted how many schools are unsure how to move fluency forward, but that it is crucial in terms of developing comprehension. The science behind it, to sum up in as succinct a manner as possible, is that if a child’s cognitive focus is overloaded with decoding, there can be no focus on comprehension. Developing fluency frees up that cognitive focus to allow for comprehension.
There’s more to it, but feel free to dive into that joyous read over the summer holidays... (or put your feet up and relax)
With the dry bit out of the way, I’ll crack on.
I’ll openly admit that I didn’t know the importance of fluency when I was teaching – maybe it’s blindingly obvious, maybe it’s not, but in the heat of the moment, my mind full of everything that teachers battle daily, this just did not enter my radar.
And yet, it makes so much sense.
For years, I’d sat with so many children, working on strategies to decode words and watching them pluckily reach that blessed full stop, only to immediately hit them with a ‘what do you think that means?’-type question. They’d stare blankly at me, and then they’d try to reread the sentence to find the answer – decoding slightly fewer of the words again. We’d both sigh, and the cycle would continue.
Now, I should note a couple of things about this scene.
1. I’m not ashamed to admit that this whole process was a massive source of frustration for both me and the child, given the overwhelming time pressure of life in a classroom, and maybe more importantly, me being completely oblivious to decoding, fluency, comprehension links.
2. Despite our reservations at starting again, the child’s strategy of rereading is completely natural and absolutely amazing for developing fluency.
3. Currently, and completely unbeknownst to me at the time, the child is only in Step 1 of a three-step journey to achieving fluency.
4. The child is a considerable distance from even beginning to deal with comprehension (despite me, with the best of intentions, questioning to develop understanding).
Ahh to know what I know now…
So, what, I hear you cry, are the three steps in this journey to achieving the pinnacle of reading fluency?
Well, Step 1 is accuracy - you see this everywhere in classrooms, and it simply means accurate decoding and general word recognition. The point that everyone starts at.
Step 2: automaticity - being able to read at an effortless pace, as a result of accuracy.
And Step 3: prosody – using stress, tone and expression to begin to understand character, and developing punctuation. It’s at this point that comprehension begins to naturally develop (but obviously can be modelled and developed through teaching too).
And thus, the grand old question – if fluency is that important, what can we do to help children develop it?
Well, to begin with, an adult modelling reading fluency is crucial. Listening to how words are stressed, how volume rises and falls, expression, tone all help children to internalise how things should be read. From this, children should undertake repeated oral reading – reading out loud numerous times takes away the need to decode every word and further develops word recognition (note, they never need to read from memory, as that defeats the purpose of reading). Once they feel comfortable, children can phrase mark the text to provide prompts when reading aloud, and the undertake a close reading of how expression and tone effects how the text is read. By the end of it, children’s confidence with reading fluently improves, and there’s the basis to move on to comprehension.
Sounds great, right? Do you know what sounds even better?
We’ve started releasing new Reading Fluency packs that follow the patterns above, to help you to develop the reading fluency within your classroom. Give them a try over a week, with quick 15-20-minute sessions, and encourage your class to read daily. No props, no learning off by heart. Just pure reading fluency fun.
