Focus on Fluency: The Neglected Goal of Reading Instruction

In the District Administration podcast, literacy experts Dr. Lynn Kulich and Dr. Robert Zewiecki from Renaissance Learning stress fluency's importance for reading comprehension and proficiency. Despite frequent assessments, fluency is rarely taught explicitly. The podcast covers evidence-based fluency practices, its impact on multilingual learners, and insights from the book "The Fluency Development Lesson: Closing Reading Gaps."

Key points include the stagnant progress in reading proficiency over the past 40 years, worsened by the pandemic, and the need for equitable access to complex texts for marginalized students. The discussion highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the "science of reading," debunking the misconception that it solely focuses on phonics.

Dr. Kulich uses the acronym CAP—Comprehension, Accuracy, Automaticity, and Prosody—to outline fluency's components, emphasizing that fluency bridges decoding and comprehension. Effective fluency instruction involves teaching these components and includes a balanced approach with decoding and context clues.

Research shows that 75-90% of students struggling with high-stakes reading tests have issues with word recognition and fluency. Improving fluency can significantly enhance reading comprehension, accounting for 20-70% of variance in comprehension from grades one through nine. Effective methods include interactive read-alouds, choral reading, echo reading, phrase reading, partner reading, and repeated reading.

Dr. Kulich's book, "The Fluency Development Lesson," offers five-day units tied to poems by David L. Harrison to improve fluency through diverse and engaging activities. The book targets teachers, literacy coaches, parents, and caregivers, providing structured lessons and a framework for customized instruction. It integrates phonics, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension, and has been successful with multilingual learners and diverse classrooms.