Fluency in Middle School: How It Works and Why It Matters
Imagine the low hum of students' choral reading (voices reading at the same time) with each other. Can you picture it if you close your eyes? The teacher walking the classroom as students vary their prosody and pacing to meet the cadence of the recently practiced echo reading the teacher conducted. Imagination isn’t required to achieve this scenario in my 7th Grade literacy classroom at Henderson Hopkins in Baltimore, MD. My students routinely echo read, choral read, and follow along – not because it’s a menial task the teacher is forcing them to do, but instead, because the teacher, me, has shared research and rationale as to why fluency matters and how fluency improves reading ability.
Fluency is an aspect of literacy that can efficiently (I hate to say easily) be incorporated to just about any classroom. David Liben has said via research with Student Achievement Partners (SAP) that even routines as simple as following along, echo reading, and choral reading can improve reading ability over the course of one school year. Fluency routines matter in my classroom. Student volunteers read the learning goal for the day, and they lead their peers in the echo read. I will selectively pull out multisyllabic words that could present as tricky vocabulary.
Another routine is “I say, you say it, clap it out.” Students repeat the word after me, then clap out the syllables. I will briefly define the word or take students predict the meaning. Then we go back and reread to clarify understanding. This process takes just a few minutes but has long-term and high yield impact on students’ overall reading ability. This process and routine can be infused into any classroom without the teacher needing to add materials, create new material or go out of their way to plan more.
Fluency over the years has been pushed around and even forgotten. At one point, my students were also “speed reading” insisting that they were fluent because of their speed. However, they were unable to tell me what they had just read, but argued they were fluent readers. Fluency does have a timing element (pacing) but needs to attend to automaticity too. A beautiful component of fluency is prosody, which ensures students are reading with meaningful expression.
One way to address the various aspects of fluency is to be honest with students about the nuances of fluency. Recently, I did a lesson with students that focused entirely on the nuances of fluency. Students read and analyzed a poem, read and discussed an informational text, read and summarized a narrative, and finally read and repeated a speech. The nuances involved in each of those focus areas can change how we engage with the text. This lesson forced students to slow down and attend to various nuances such as rhyme scheme in poems, a speaker’s motivation in the speech, information to learn in the informational text, and character dialogue in the narrative. In subsequent lessons, I have seen students apply various techniques and nuances to become more fluent.
In my classroom, I have added fluency annotations to our toolbox. Fluency annotations involve students reading a passage, and using various symbols to represent when they need to pause and take a breath, emphasize a word, speed up or slow down. These symbols help with pacing, but also reading with prosody, as students are attending to various adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Asking simple questions such as, “What verbs stand out to you? Why” can be instrumental in helping organize the text and their thoughts as they process the effects of prosody on their overall fluency. Students find joy in reading passages with dialogue and using different voices to denote different characters.
Consider the following: The devastating development rocked the small town. Citizens soon began to panic as the unsettling news began to sink in… this town was haunted. Students write this in their reading journals. I read this dryly then ask students, “Was I reading fluently?” Students are split – I said the words correctly, but they say that I was also lacking “juice” or “energy.” A typical response has been, “Mr. K – that was dry. That wasn’t how you read to us normally.” We then unpack what is happening in this statement by asking the simple question, “What is happening?” I follow that up by asking “What words stand out to you? Why?” This makes for great group discussions or a turn and talk. After a whole group shareout, some consensus is needed. The words that stand out are: devastating, rocked, panic, unsettling, haunted. Then, I read as I typically do (with far more prosody, which I refer to as ‘emotional comprehension’ in my classroom). I ask students, “Based on how you heard me read this, what aspects of fluency did you notice?” Students will mention noticing my pacing, my speed and prosody on certain words. From there, it’s time for annotating for fluency using underlines, slashes, or up arrows. A student response in their notes could look something like this: The devastating^ / development / rocked^ the small town. / Citizens soon began to panic^ / as the un / sett / ling news began to sink in… / this town was haunted^.
Notice that students intentionally have to slow down, consider where they’d want to pause for emphasis or dramatic effect, and note those marks in their writing. Students will then practice reading aloud with a partner to receive feedback from a trusted colleague before I ask volunteers to share aloud. The class does not give feedback; instead I ask them to determine where and what annotation symbols our volunteer used when constructing their version.
The work from Student Achievement Partners around literacy and fluency has been instrumental in my core beliefs about why I should prioritize fluency in the upper grades and with my 7th Graders. Achievethecore.org has many resources to help teachers get started. Prioritize fluency, even the low-hanging fruit, because those seeds will bear committed readers.