Reading Fluency Essay

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Reading Fluency Glaser and Moats (2008) define reading fluency as the ability to read smoothly and accurately, while using prosody – proper phrasing and expression. Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp and Jenkins (2001) add emphasis on the reader’s ability to process meaning, relate meaning to prior information, and make inferences (pp. 239-240). In order to become a fluent reader, a student must develop automaticity. Just as a professional musician no longer has to consciously think about time signatures, keys, or techniques, a fluent reader should no longer have to call to mind specific phonics or spelling rules. For a fluent reader, these skills will have become so embedded in the process of reading that they will come naturally (Reading Fluency, p. 2). In order for these skills to be ingrained in a student’s mind, they must be taught systematically and explicitly, at the proper time and in the proper sequence. Hollis Scarborough depicts this learning process as a rope being woven together strand by strand (How Children learn to Read, p. 11). The strands making up the word recognition portion of the rope are phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. These are skills that should become increasingly automatic. The most common problem encountered by students who are struggling with reading is difficulty with phonic decoding and accurate word recognition (How Children Learn to Read, p. 6). Research indicates that phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are incredibly important in learning to decode. A student’s inability to identify the sounds in a word as well as blend them to form the word’s pronunciation may lead to multiple attempts to pronounce an unknown word, thus decreasing both the student’s reading speed and comprehension (Hudson, Pullen, Lane, & Torkgesen, p. 10). The number of words that a student recognizes by sight in a particular
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