A fluency intervention is appropriate for students who are accurate in their reading of grade level texts, but lack automaticity. The three components of fluency – appropriate speed (rate), accuracy, and prosody (expression) – can be addressed through instructional strategies such as repeated readings, partner reading, choral reading, technology-assisted reading, timed reading, phrased reading, and echo reading.
What is Fluency?
Fluency is defined as reading with sufficient accuracy, rate, and expression to support comprehension (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2006). Reading fluency is essential for students to have the cognitive capacity to comprehend and think critically about a text.
Explicit Intervention in Fluency
In an intervention for fluency, it is important that lessons support skills in all areas of fluency (accuracy, rate, and expression) and employ instructional strategies that integrate phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, vocabulary, and morphology into intervention lessons. The video below explains more about planning and providing explicit intervention in fluency.
RIMP Code Video Series
Preparing to Implement the Intervention
Before delivering an explicit intervention in fluency, establish that the students can read at least 95% of words accurately on a grade-level passage. Students who are accurate in their reading but lack automaticity are good candidates for explicit intervention in fluency.
Plan explicit instructional routines, such as those presented in the video, that model fluent reading and allow for students’ meaningful practice with decoding, high frequency words, and target vocabulary found in readings or content lessons.
What Elements to Include in a Fluency Intervention
Phonemic Awareness, Decoding, and Vocabulary
Vocabulary and Morphemes
Diagnostic-Prescriptive Teaching
Instruction targeting phoneme fluency— identifying first sounds, blending, and segmenting sounds in spoken words— including the printed letters that represent the target phoneme and word meanings.
Instruction that develops the layers of language— sound, meaning, context, and spelling— and that builds understanding of vocabulary words and their meanings.
Instruction based on students' needs that includes continuous progress monitoring of skills so content is mastered with accuracy and automaticity.
Intervention Flags
When designing an intervention plan, it’s important to consider characteristics of effective instruction. The green flags and red flags can also be used to evaluate intervention programs. Click the arrow to view the attributes of effective and ineffective instruction. Click on the hotspots below to read more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Featured Resources
This table shows the oral reading fluency rates of elementary students. Students scoring below the 50th percentile may need fluency support.
Visit the Florida Center for Reading Research and search for fluency lessons by grade level.
This infographic from the National Center on Improving Literacy outlines four steps to building fluency with text.
These activities from Student Achievement Partners are designed to support growth in reading fluency during in-person or virtual learning.
Student Achievement Partners has compiled passages to help students build fluency over the course of the school year.
This blog post from the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities Teacher's Corner focuses on reading fluency in classrooms.
Learn about an evidence-based intervention that can be used with students who have accurate word reading but show poor fluency.
Read this book by Jan Hasbrouk, Ph.D. and Deborah Glaser, Ed.D. and learn more about the complex skill of reading fluency.
Additional Learning Opportunities
Dr. Laura Stewart shares fluency building techniques in Part 3 of this Zaner-Bloser webinar series.
This toolkit from the National Center on Improving Literacy provides information, examples, and resources for teachers and families on reading fluency.
Watch Reading Fluency: Essential for Reading Comprehension presented by Dr. Jan Hasbrouck.