Fluency

 

FLUENCY

Are you worried that your child’s reading is too slow and laborious, or lacks expression?

This page is for you. 

“Fluency” is the technical term for natural, effortless reading at the passage level. It is an advanced reading skill and relies on a strong foundation of many other subskills. If you are concerned that your child is not reading fluently, this page will help walk you through what fluency is, how to assess it, when to worry and when not to worry, and what to do if you find that your child’s fluency is low. 

Basically, this page contains everything you ever wanted to know about fluency, and probably a fair bit more (sorry-not-sorry about that).

Jump to:         Assessing Fluency       |      Problems & Solutions    

What is Fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read:

    Accurately
    Quickly
    With Expression  (this is sometimes referred to as “prosody”)

Fluent reading sounds natural and effortless, as if the reader were having a conversation with you.

If your child is not reading fluently, it may interfere with their reading comprehension. Disfluent readers are also typically unmotivated to read, because reading is such a struggle.

Fluency is an advanced reading ability. Beginning readers must first develop at least some proficiency in the foundational skills of reading: phonics (letter-sound knowledge), phonemic awareness (the ability to segment, blend and manipulate individual sounds in words) and decoding (sounding out words) prior to becoming fluent readers. They must gain some letter-level automaticity and word-level automaticity BEFORE phrase-level, sentence-level, and passage-level fluency can be meaningfully addressed. See my post on Phonics.

Want to dive in? Watch this video presentation from the Fluency Guru: Jan Hasbrouck.

Read More:  Components of Fluency - Five from Five   |  Fluency Basics - Reading Rockets | What is Fluency? - NSW Education  | Fluency - Reading Universe | Fluency - U of O |   Reading Fluency - Jan Hasbrouck |

Videos: Building Fluent Readers - Jan Hasbrouck (5 min)  |   Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours)  |  Prosody - Tim Rasinski (2 min)  |  Discovering the Path to Fluency - Tim Rasinski (35 min) |  Reading Fluency - Cox Campus FREE Course (2-3 hours) |

Stay in the Loop 

Assessing Fluency

How do you know if your child is reading fluently enough?

First, keep in mind that even if your child’s fluency is low, you may not need to focus on fluency interventions yet. Your child must have some foundational skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding before fluency can be truly addressed. This is why fluency is not often measured formally in Kindergarten.

Quick Clues that Fluency is Low:

• Sounding out words letter-by-letter

• Slow, staccato reading, where a passage is read like a list of words

• Expressionless “robot” reading

• Exhaustion after reading for several minutes.
  
  

However, it is incredibly important to note that in order for students to read well, they must go through a sounding out phase. It is this sounding out process which wires the brain for reading. Read more about How the Brain Reads.

Formal Measures of Fluency: Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)

Fluency is typically measured using an Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) assessment. A teacher or evaluator can perform this for you (and may have a number for you already). This is also something you can get an estimate of on your own. 

Oral Reading Fluency is measured by the number of words a student reads correctly per minute (WCPM) on a grade-level passage. 

In addition to ORF, you will find it valuable to make some notes about your child’s expressiveness when reading. You can simply monitor their pauses, use an extensive prosody rubric, or something in-between. I usually go with something on the simpler side unless the child doesn’t show progress in this area despite increasing rate and accuracy. 

How Do I Take an ORF Measurement?

How do you administer an ORF assessment? Essentially, you will listen to your child read a grade-level passage for one minute, mark any mistakes or 3-second hesitations as errors, then tally how many words they read correctly in one minute (see this quick video example). They should not have practiced or seen the passage before. 

There are several reputable sources for obtaining free ORF materials and passages online, including DIBELS and EasyCBM. Be sure to familiarize yourself with their administration guide. It will walk you through the entire process for introducing the assessment and for error marking procedures. Use the exact procedure as written in the guide for accurate results. 

Note that ORF is measured from First Grade onward. In Kindergarten, students are expected to be focusing on phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding, so their fluency is often low and not worth measuring.

When taking an ORF, I prefer to administer three passages, score each one, and take the average of the scores. If doing this, just be sure to check the passage you use to see if it's for the Beginning/BOY (Beginning of Year), Middle/MOY (Middle of Year), or End/EOY (End of Year). While some passages may use the Beginning/BOY method to mark this, others simply use decimal numeration (eg 2.1 for the first passage in Grade 2, and 2.2 for the second passage in Grade 2, etc). This information will usually be in the teacher or “scoring” version of the passage, not the student version. You may need to use passages from multiple sources if you wish to take the average of three while sticking to the beginning/middle/end of year alignment.

Free ORF Assessment Instructions and Passages:

DIBELS and EasyCBM are two sets of materials put out by the University of Oregon that have reliable and widely used measures for assessing students’ ORF. They include many other assessments as well, such as Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) lists.

DIBELS 8.0
Many schools use the University of Oregon’s DIBELS ORF for benchmarking (measuring student performance against standards or peers), and progress monitoring.

DIBELS 8.0 Administration Guide - Directions
See pages 76-80 for the ORF directions. There are other tests and complicated scoring systems involved in DIBELS. You don’t need to bother with those if all you want is ORF. Just follow the brief directions for the ORF.

DIBELS 8.0 Materials & Scoring Booklets  
These will come as .ZIP files by grade. 

There are benchmarking passages for BOY/MOY/EOY and progress monitoring passages for assessing inbetween.

In each grade level packet, among other testing materials, you will find several Oral Reading Fluency Passages. The Scoring Booklet contains the parent/teacher version of the ORF passages. These have helpful information on them such as the time of year to use the passage for assessment (i.e. beginning, middle, end of year), the script you will read to your child before they begin, and the word count of the passage pre-tallied for you, line-by-line, for fast scoring. 

The Materials zip files will contain the student version of the passages. 

For ORF, you will NOT need the “Maze” files within the zip. You will also not need the NWF portions of the packet. 

EasyCBM 

This resource, also put out by the University of Oregon, has additional grade-level passages that you can use to calculate ORF once you are familiar with the process. 

How Fluent is Fluent Enough?
How Does My Child Compare?

A great deal of real-world fluency data has been collected and compiled by researchers, so we now have a very good idea what an “average” ORF words-correct-per-minute looks like for each grade level. These are called Fluency Norms.

An average student (in the “50th percentile”) in the middle of 1st Grade will read grade-level material at about 30 wcpm. By 6th Grade, the average student will read 145 wcpm. College graduates have ORFs only slightly above this when reading complex “grade level material” - an average of about 150 wcpm (Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017,  Rasinski, 2022)

The tables linked below contain WCPM values arranged by Grade and “Percentile.” Keep in mind that faster is not always better. Jan Hasbrouck, the researcher behind many of these fluency studies, notes that an ORF at or above the 50th Percentile would be considered fluent reading. Because both slow reading AND overly fast reading can result in loss of comprehension, she suggests that achieving an ORF in the 50th-75th percentile is an ideal target ( Hasbrouck, 2020, Hasbrouck, 2023 ).

If a student reads a bit faster or a bit slower but enjoys reading, and has good comprehension, that’s perfectly fine. Remember, the end goal for our kiddos is comprehension and enjoyment, not speed.

Oral Reading Fluency Norms Tables

What is a typical ORF for each grade level? Click through to see the table.

Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017)

So how fluent is fluent enough? If your child is around or above the 50th percentile for ORF, and/or if they appear to be fairly comfortable reading at their pace, and understand what they are reading, your child is probably doing just fine.

Links to More: Assessing Fluency - Five from Five  |  Understanding and Assessing Fluency - Jan Hasbrouck  |  Prosody - Tim Shanahan  | Fluency Norms Chart - Reading Rockets | Oral Reading Fluency Chart - Read Naturally |

Podcasts: Fluency isn’t Just About Speed - Jan Hasbrouck & The Measured Mom |
Videos:  Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours)  | 

Pinpointing the Problem:

Why is Fluency Low? What Can We Do About It?

So what do you do if your child’s fluency is below average?

It might NOT be a “fluency” intervention.

         … wait, what?

Fluency is a very complex aspect of reading to remediate because accurate, swift, expressive reading is built upon a foundation of other skills. A child needs to have accurate, automatic phonics, phonemic awareness, decoding, and basic word-level automaticity before they will be able to read fluently at the passage level. Beyond this, there are several other factors that can come into play when talking about fluency issues.

Problems and Solutions:

1. Check Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, and Decoding Skills
   Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, and Decoding form the foundation of reading. If there are deficits in these areas, you will want an intervention targeted here.

            This is the #1, most fundamental issue to look at with regards to fluency.
         

Most children with fluency issues, and particularly students with dyslexia, will very very often have gaps in phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding skills, and subsequently have low word-level automaticity as a result. This must be remediated before passage-level fluency will improve significantly. Use a Structured Literacy approach to remediate these issues. Know your options. Structured Literacy approaches include, OG, Direct Instruction, and Speech-to-Print (aka Linguistic Phonics). The speech-to-print / linguistic phonics approaches tend to be more efficient, intuitive, and effective for most students.  See my post on Phonics, Phonemic Awareness and Decoding and my post on Linguistic Phonics / Speech-to-Print

2. RAN
   RAN stands for Rapid Automatized Naming. It refers to the speed at which someone is able to identify objects or letters. Only about 20% of children who struggle to read have a purely phonological deficit. Nearly 70% have both a phonological deficit and fluency based RAN deficit (listen here). RAN is easy to assess. You can access testing materials through Acadience. Current research indicates that we cannot change RAN directly. If your child’s evaluation states that RAN is low, be aware that they may need extra practice to reach automaticity with words and fluency at the passage level, and some children with low RAN may continue to read slightly slower than the average student. One program specifically designed for children who have low RAN is Maryanne Wolf's RAVE-O. Keep in mind that this would be used *after* a phonics program. If you don't have access to a full program such as RAVE-O, you can still take advantage of many of its underlying principles by considering Maryanne Wolf's multi-component POSSUM framework in the reading intervention activities you choose. POSSUM stands for: Phonology (Sounds/Phonemes), Orthography (Spelling/Graphemes), Syntax, Semantics, Understanding, and Morphology. Wiring the brain for reading requires building connections between three key areas of the brain: meaning centers, sound centers, and visual centers. Many children come to reading with their meaning processing centers and (to a lesser extent in kids with auditory difficulties!) sound processing centers fairly well developed. The connections between meaning and sound need to be linked to the third component: visible letters. Phonics interventions that focus heavily on learning letter-sounds in isolation spend much of their time emphasizing only the "PO" aspects of POSSUM. This, unfortunately, is what most Orton-Gillingham phonics programs spend about 25% of their time doing. Other programs, such as Linguistic Phonics cut out the isolated drills altogether and move straight into letter-sound knowledge being taught in the context of word building and word chaining activities. This approach uses "POSM" and requires children to build connections between the sound, visual, and meaning centers of the brain. This is particularly important for children with processing difficulties such as RAN, but also kids who struggle with speech sounds. Linking to the meaning processor offers them a more solid foothold in the the brain. Activities that integrate attention to word meanings (especially words with multiple meanings!), morphological elements of words, and how words work in sentences will all be more beneficial to children with low RAN than activities that simply focus on letter-sounds in isolation, or simply repeated reading of texts. Listen: Building Fluency with POSSUM with Melissa Orkin and Maryanne Wolf (Podcast) || Read: Building Fluency with POSSUM - Crafting Minds Melissa Orkin || Maryanne Wolf knows her Proust and her POSSUM - National Education Policy Center || The More You Know: How Teaching Multiple Aspects of Word Knowledge Builds Fluency Skills - The Reading League || Explicit Vocabulary Instruction using POSSUM ||
   
   

3. Guessing
   Is your child guessing words based on picture clues, context, or the first letter? This can lead to inaccurate reading, slow reading (due to having to go back and correct themselves), and reading comprehension issues. For many years, schools thought that teaching students the poor strategy of guessing words from pictures, context, and the first letter was the right way to teach reading (watch Is My Kid Learning to Read? Part 1 and Part 2). This process teaches students to deprioritize the letters and sounds, and guess words instead (unfortunately, we now know that this is not a good approach ). Most students will never become fluent readers using this method. We now understand the neuroscience of reading; guessing is not how our brain learns to read. Yet many many schools still teach using these so-called MSV, Three-Cueing or “Balanced Literacy” methods today, so be hypervigilant. Posters and "reading strategies" like these are a red flag that your school may be using these outdated, ineffective methods to teach reading. Stuck on a Word? DON'T use these strategies Red Flags - Why Three Cueing is Ineffective - by Five From Five What if your school teaches guessing? What should you do if your child’s school isn’t teaching reading right? Do not let your child guess words. Slay the Guessing Monster. In order for effortless reading to develop, words must be sounded-out many times so that they are properly imprinted and "orthographically mapped" in the brain. If you or your child sees posters or methods like the above in school, tell your child:  “Those guessing strategies are for kids who don’t know how to read, but in our house, we are learning to READ. You are becoming a reader, so you don’t need to guess the word. Just try your best to sound it out! I’ll help you if you get stuck.” This is how the brain learns to read. By sounding-out. If a child makes an error when sounding out the word, point to the letter they mispronounced and ask what other sound the letter can make, or simply tell them the sound. Then have them sound out the word again properly (here are some tips). Use a structured literacy approach that incorporates phonics, phonemic awareness and decoding practice to teach your child to read. After a number of repetitions, your child will have stored the letter-sound relationships of the word in their long term memory. This is referred to as orthographic mapping. Once this has occurred, your child will recognize the word instantly on sight, and will no longer have to sound out. Importantly, this is not the same as rote memorization. The words must be sounded out multiple times for true orthographic mapping and storage in long term memory to occur. Read more about How the Brain Reads. Also see my post on Phonics, Phonemic Awareness and Decoding.

4. Word Attack Cognitive Load
   

Consider what your child has been taught when it comes to decoding words. To be fluent readers, reading needs to be rapid and intuitive.

Less is more. Short Words Many traditional phonics programs teach students to tackle short words through what is known as "segmented phonation." In this approach, children are taught to segment short words into individual sounds and then go back and blend the entire word. It might sound like this: M--A--T ... MAT!

Researchers have discovered that this is *not* the best way to teach children to sound out words. What is better is what is known as "connected phonation" or "successive blending" which might sound like this: MMMMAAAATT ... MAT! Or, especially in the case of slightly longer words ... MMMAAA ... MMMAAAT ... MAT! This is particularly important for children with low working memory. Working memory refers to the number of pieces of information that someone can hold in their brain while trying to work with it. Most adults can only hold 6-7 pieces of information in working memory at a time and only for a few seconds to a minute. For children, this is even less. A struggling child is often unable to hold those segmented pieces of information in their working memory long enough to blend them into a word. Connected phonation solves this issue by turning three pieces of information (M-A-T) into two (MMAAA-T). Be sure to check if your phonics program has updated to connected phonation / successive blending or if it still uses the outdated segmented blending approach. Read More: Connected Phonation is More Effective - Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri 2021 || Fostering Reading Success - Hassler et al 2025 || Connected Phonation is More Effective than Segmented - Reading Rockets || Blending Sounds to Read Words - Reading Simplified ||

Longer Words Consider what your child has been taught when it comes to decoding longer words. In this case less between the child and the page is more. This is (nearly) all the guidance they need: “Sound it out. Try another sound there. What other sound could these letters be?” Many phonics programs unfortunately approach long words by attempting to use what are called “syllable division rules” to guide pronunciation. This can be incredibly cognitively demanding for children. If a child has to pause at every long word and consider how to divide the syllables, and which syllable rules apply, their brain gets overloaded. Reading speed crawls to a standstill and their fluency plummets. Syllable division rules have an added downside in that the syllable rules don’t work very often, so the time spent teaching these rules is not very fruitful. Children must develop Set for Variability to successfully tackle long words (listen to The Measured Mom’s podcast on SfV). What is Set for Variability? Basically, it means developing phonics knowledge and the ability to rapidly adjust sounds in words to arrive at the correct pronunciation. Some programs that teach using Set for Variability and without syllable rules are "Linguistic Phonics" or "Speech-To-Print" programs. What is Linguistic Phonics? You can find my Linguistic Phonics 101 here. It is also helpful to learn more about Cognitive Load and reading. Check out to this podcast on Cognitive Load Theory from the Measured Mom. Stay tuned for my post on Reading and Cognitive Load. You can also read a mini-summary of cognitive load in my Phonics post.

5. Lack of Comprehension
   If your child doesn’t understand a significant portion of the vocabulary or phrases in a passage, they will struggle to read with true fluency. Deficits in this area can impact your child’s ORF accuracy and rate if they don't know how to pronounce the word because it is not in their oral lexicon. It will also very likely impact their ability to read with expression, and of course they will have a difficult time understanding what they are reading. Reading Comprehension and Fluency have a reciprocal relationship. It’s difficult to understand what you are reading if you read too slowly, but you can’t read with swift, fluent expression if you do not understand what you are reading. Some kids who struggle in this department may simply need to build up their understanding of complex sentence structures, vocabulary, and morphological automaticity. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf emphasizes the importance of considering POSSUM ( phonology, orthography, semantics, syntax, morphology ) when teaching kids to read fluently (see above). Be aware that some kids may have more substantial underlying issues such as Hyperlexia or Developmental Language Disorder (see below). Stay tuned for my post on Reading Comprehension.
   
   
   

6. Other Underlying Issues That Impact Fluency
   Some children have underlying issues or “co-morbidities” (beyond dyslexia!) that can interfere with fluent reading. Do not under-estimate the impact that these can have on your child’s reading. Here are some of the most common issues:
   
   Vision Issues
   If a child has issues with their eyesight, reading is going to remain a struggle. The trouble is, not all vision issues are picked up at an eye exam with a general practitioner. One particularly common culprit that impacts reading and can occur even if a child has 20/20 vision is Convergence Insufficiency (CI). While there are self-screening tests you can do at home, you will want to contact an optometrist to diagnose (Note: optometrists and opthamologists do not necessarily include this as part of a standard eye exam, so be sure you ask). Convergence Insufficiency is 3x more common in children with ADHD compared to the general population (16% vs 2-3%). See also my page on Vision and Visual Processing Issues
   
   Visual Processing Deficits
   We've all heard this tired refrain: “Dyslexia is not a vision disorder.” However, we know from leading language neuroscientist Stanislaus Deheane that there are visual subtypes of dyslexia, while another prominent reading scientist, Mark Seidenberg, has found that struggling readers have significantly higher difficulties with excluding visual distractions than normal readers. This can make passage-reading a major uphill battle. Of course, vision issues impact reading; this is why we buy reading glasses when we get older. And of course issues with the brain’s visual processing system can impact reading. Reading is, in part, a visual processing act. And there are many visual processing problems that can impact reading. Whether or not we label them as dyslexia or not is neither here nor there. We just want to help our kids read. Including those with Visual Processing Disorders. Signs of Visual Processing Disorder: Do any of these sound like your child? Headaches or tiredness when reading; rubbing eyes after reading a passage; persistently slow, laborious, or robotic reading; swapping letters in words, skipping words in sentences, dragging letters from nearby words into the target word; inaccurate or very strained passage level reading; better at spelling than reading; stubbornly low fluency despite solid phonics and phonemic awareness, and a fair amount of reading practice. Children with visual or visuo-attentional processing disorders may ... swap letters within words, reading FORM as FROM; or switch letters between words, reading PIKE BALE as PALE BIKE; Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene discusses some of these visual processing errors in this video at the 40 minute mark. If any of these sound like your child, it is worth exploring the possibility that they have convergence insufficiency or a visual processing disorder. There may be interventions that can help them beyond typical reading interventions. Read my Visual Processing Issues page to learn more about how to help your child. ADHD - Attention Deficits

Approximately 30% of children with Dyslexia also have ADHD. Similar to visuo-attentional deficits, kids with ADHD may struggle to keep their place in text, or inadvertently skip over words, parts of words, or punctuation. There is overlap in processing deficits between children who have dyslexia and those who have ADHD, making certain aspects of these disorders difficult to disentangle. Can reading improvements occur by treating the ADHD alone? For some children, this can happen, but not all. And if they have fallen too far behind, they will still need reading remediation. It is likely best to treat both (see Espinas et al 2025, and Tamm et al 2017). Studies show some indication that decoding interventions are more successful for ADHD students than reading comprehension interventions, and that intervention can be successful even without medication. Read more: ADHD and reading - Reading Rockets || Tips for Parents of Children with ADHD - Reading Rockets || The Dyslexia and ADHD Connection - ADDitude Mag || Genetic Link Between ADHD and Dyslexia - ABC.au || Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Dyslexia - IDA ||

Working Memory Issues Working memory refers to the ability to actively store, focus on, and manipulate an amount of information, while inhibiting irrelevant information for a short amount of time. Most adults can only hold 6-7 pieces of information in working memory at a time and only for a few seconds to a minute. For children, this is even less. Low verbal working memory was found to be associated with students with low reading comprehension (see Carretti et al 2009). Many ADHD kids also have working memory issues. As mentioned previously, if a child has issues with their working memory, they'll have trouble holding multiple pieces of information in their head at once. This can cause problems for them when they are sounding out long words (quick tip - use continuous or successive blending, as is done in linguistic phonics programs). Working memory (WM) issues can also trip children up when trying to make sense of long sentences or passages, or when asked to apply too many rules when reading (as is often done in traditional Orton-Gillingham interventions). For example, if a child is reading "specialization" As discussed earlier, syllable division "rules" also have a big disadvantage in that they don't work very often. There is some research which suggests that tasks designed to improve specific domains of working memory (WM) may also improve reading skills such as comprehension. This is sometimes done with computer-based programs such as CogMed (see Dahlin 2011), but also with paper-and-pencil tasks ( see Carretti et al 2014; García-Madruga et al 2013). Relatedly, domain-specific working memory intervention has been found to be helpful for improving ability on math word problems - particularly when WM intervention sessions were immediately followed by math practice ( see Fuchs et al 2022 ). Key takeaways? Find phonics programs which use connected phonation or successive blending, and that don't teach complex rules for word pronunciation, such as linguistic phonics programs. If struggles persist, consider a Working Memory intervention (see options linked above), and follow it immediately with a reading session for best transfer of skills.

Hyperlexia
Children with hyperlexia read swiftly and accurately, but lack expression because they do not understand what they are reading. Most often, this phenomenon co-occurs with autism/ASD. Read more about Hyperlexia. Do keep in mind that even skilled readers sometimes also selectively let their mind wander while reading, and that this can be a reason that kids read passages without expression; they aren't paying attention, and simply need to be.

Developmental Language Disorder
Approximately 7% of children have DLD - a disorder which impacts the ability to understand and use complex language (oral or written). There are expressive and receptive forms of DLD. This affects not only reading and writing, but listening and speaking, and is different from dyslexia or ADHD. There is some overlap with dysgraphia, and handwriting intervention may be needed to ensure they aren't expending too much cognitive energy in letter formation. Letter formation should feel swift and automatic to them, not laborious. If your child has difficulty not only with reading comprehension, but also listening comprehension (ie understanding text read aloud TO them), they may have Developmental Language Disorder. Read More: DLD Resource Room - DLDandme || DLD Resources - DLD Project || Terminology Study || Listening Comprehension Assessment NLM - Free Paper Version CUBED NLM || Research Papers: Treatment of DLD - Rinaldi et al 2021 || Vocabulary Interventions - Ansari et al 2025 ||

7. Fluency Intervention!
   
   Once all of the above issues are actively being addressed, what most kids need to improve their reading fluency is practice, practice, and more practice reading aloud. It will take a fair bit of practice for children to increase their reading fluency.
   
   Repeated Reading
   The most widely used, tried-and-true method for improving fluency once the above issues have been addressed is Repeated Reading (see also Thierren 2004). Quite simply, this means having students read the same short, yet slightly challenging passage aloud multiple times, with immediate corrective feedback from you. A general guideline is a 50-250 word passage, read 2-3 times.
   
   If this sounds boring to you, you might be pleasantly surprised when you try it with a child. It’s not as boring as it sounds! When children are still struggling to become fluent readers, their first reading of the text will often be slow and laborious. When they read it again, they will be encouraged at how much their reading improves the second time around. Expression will be improved further if, after the first read, you do a comprehension check and/or a retell ( “Whoa, okay, so what just happened there?” ) and discuss the passage.
   
   There are a few variations of repeated reading that you can try if you want to spice things up. Check out EBLI’s Read, Read Back, and Read Again technique for supported reading, or get your kids acting with Reader’s Theater, radio reading (try to sound like a broadcaster or audiobook narrator), funny voices, or poetry slams. You can also try the evidence-based partner reading, (see also this partner reading, paragraph shrinking video), echo reading, or choral reading.
   
   If you don’t mind a screen-based program, you might try Read Naturally, or if you want a book of activities, you could try The Megabook of Fluency (be aware though, that some of these activities focus on automaticity at the word level, not the passage level), there are also these fluency activities, some phrase chunking activities, and even more fluency-building ideas. Don't overdo repeated readings of a single passage. If it starts to sound like the child has begun to memorize the passage, it's time for a new one. You can also use broader readings on a similar topic that uses similar vocabulary, or a chapter book that uses repeated vocabulary. There is some evidence that wide reading may sometimes be as effective as repeated reading. Read More: Everything You Wanted to Know About Repeated Reading - Timothy Shanahan || Repeated Reading Routine for Fluency - Reading Simplified || Repeated Reading - Five from Five ||
   
   Corrective Feedback The key with any of these approaches is to provide immediate, corrective feedback to your kiddo when and if they make a mistake. Here is an example video from Reading Simplified that demonstrates several error correction techniques which you can draw from. The important thing is to ensure that the children are the ones doing the work of reading the passage.
   
   Initially, and with harder words, you may need to give them more feedback: “You’re right! This letter CAN say [that] sound, but here it says [this] sound.” Framing things in a positive light by pointing out what they did right will help with motivation. Later on, you should be able to simply tap beneath the letter and/or say “Hmm?” or  “Whoops,” or “Try that one again,” and they will have the skills to self-correct. Here are some more tips for error correction. You'll likely also find it useful to take this wonderful free parents' course from Sounds-Write. Tackling Long Words:
   If your kiddo is getting fairly automatic with short words but struggling to tackle longer words, here are a two approaches that can help: Sound-Out-By-Chunk Breaking up words into chunks by spoken syllable (natural spoken syllable breaks, NOT by "rules"), can really help make long words less daunting. Check out Reading Simplified's One Easy Strategy for Multisyllabic Words, and Syllables, R Controlled Vowels, and Phonics Instruction and Polysyllabic Words. You can also read more about the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches at: What Helps Kids read and spell multisyllable words?, at Syllable Division: New Data, and at Syllable Rules, Do We Need Them? (short answer: nope!) Map the Morphemes Morphemes are the "meaningful chunks" of words. They are the building blocks of the English language that the scribes used to construct written English long ago. The most well known of the morphemes are "prefixes" and "suffixes." Morphemes have largely stable spellings and because of this can be orthographically mapped for instant recognition in a similar way that whole words can (listen to this podcast with a star-studded cast of reading gurus for more about how teaching Morphology can help make long words Sight Words). As adults, we have all probably done this with many morphemes such as < re- > ("reuse, reinvent, reformat"). Morphemes are meaningful word chunks that, when we can rapidly identify them, we can use to quickly sound out and make sense of complex words such as 'reaccreditation' and 'representationalism.' Explicitly teaching kids to automatically identify prefixes, suffixes, and base morphemes can help them immensely when tackling longer words. One fabulous (and free!) program that you can use to help accomplish this is the morphological fluency program Word Connections by Dr. Jessica Toste. Personally, I use the Word Connections activities alongside the Reading Simplified phonics program when doing intervention with older kids. I adapted the scope and sequence of WC to match that of the RS phonics program (my spreadsheet of words lists is here). A Multi-Component Approach Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf emphasizes the importance of taking a Multi-Component Approach to building reading fluency: POSSUM - Phonology, Orthography, Semantics, Syntax, and Morphology. All these pieces need to be working together before a student will be able to understand what they read, and therefore read "fluently." Another quick way to help build cognitive flexibility and deftness in switching the brain from meaning to sound is this card sort intervention developed by Cartwright (2012). It's a brain bender, but also feels very much like a game for kids! I do have cards for this. Let me know if you're interested and I'll try to wrangle them into a condition to post on my free TPT site. :)

last but not least...

Don’t Stress

Fluency is an advanced reading skill, and it takes time to develop. Knowing where and why hiccups can occur will help you to help your child. 

As we saw in the ORF tables above, competent readers may read at a broad range of speeds. The important thing is getting your child up to a threshold where they feel comfortable reading, and where they can understand what they read.

Speed is not the end goal. Comprehension and enjoyment are.

Questions or Comments?

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Additional Resources

Further Reading: Repeated Readings - Reading Simplified   |   Evidence Based Fluency Instruction - Five from Five   |    Reading Fluency - Nathaniel Hansford  |   Reading Fluency Instruction - MultiLit   |  Repeated Reading - MultiLit  |  Reading Fluency - Timothy Rasinski   |   Everything You Wanted to Know About Repeated Reading - Tim Shanahan   | The More You Know - Wolf et al 2022 | How to Improve Reading Fluency - The Measured Mom | Dos and Don't of Teaching Fluency - The Measured Mom |   Improve Fluency and Comprehension by Providing Supported Reading - EBLI   |   The 411 on 4 Types of Reading Errors - Reading Simplified  |

Academic Articles: Repeated Reading Meta-Analysis - Therrien (2004)  |  The Complex Nature of Reading Fluency - Hudson et al. (2008) |

Podcasts: What to Do After Administering the ORF  |  Implementing Reader’s Theatre - The Measured Mom   |   Revisiting Fluency Assessment and Instruction - Jan Hasbrouck   |

Videos:   Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours)  |  Building Fluent Readers - Jan Hasbrouck (5 min)  |  Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours)  |  Improve Fluency & Comprehension Webinar - EBLI   |  Prosody - Tim Rasinski (2 min)  |  Discovering the Path to Fluency - Tim Rasinski (35 min) |

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