What is oral reading fluency?
Before students can master silent reading fluency, they start their reading journey with oral reading, setting the stage for proper comprehension.
Oral reading is typically the main focus during the Early Years and Key Stage 1 of education. This is the stage where students lay the groundwork for their reading journey by developing essential skills like phonemic awareness and phonics proficiency. During this exciting time, they learn to decode words, combine sentences, and make it through their first books. This is commonly known as the “learning-to-read” phase.
During this phase, teachers have the opportunity to closely monitor their students’ reading performance, including speed, accuracy, and expression, as they read aloud. It becomes immediately apparent when a student struggles with reading a word or sentence accurately, allowing the teacher to promptly and effectively intervene to provide necessary support.
What is silent reading fluency?
Silent reading fluency is the ability to read silently with concentration, at appropriate reading rates comfortably, and with clear understanding. This skill serves as a crucial link between the ability to recognise words and the comprehension of what is being read.
Silent reading combines three skills that actively work together as a student reads. These are:
- Physical – During reading, students’ eyes track across each word in a sentence with precision and efficiency, following a particular order.
- Cognitive – As students progress through the text, they identify the vocabulary of each word and string the sentence together to comprehend the meaning.
- Emotional – When students complete reading, their feelings influence outcomes. If students feel confident and interested, they are more likely to continue reading.
Students cannot attain silent reading fluency without the capacity to swiftly recognise and comprehend words, including decoding unfamiliar ones. Solid fluency is formed through automatic word recognition, understanding language, and having a strong vocabulary. It facilitates enhanced text comprehension and empowers readers to expand their vocabularies, thus enabling a deeper understanding of increasingly complex texts.
When fluent readers engage in silent reading, they:
- Recognise words instantly.
- Swiftly group words together.
- Extract meaning seamlessly from the text.
Students must consistently hone these skills as they engage with reading in order to become skilled in silent reading.
In contrast to oral reading fluency, effectively assessing and supporting silent reading fluency poses a challenge for teachers. This crucial skill operates invisibly, making it harder to detect and address areas needing improvement. However, mastering silent reading fluency is indispensable for becoming a proficient reader.
Why is silent reading fluency important?
As students progress into Year 4, there’s a notable shift in their reading journey. At this stage, the emphasis pivots towards utilising reading as a tool for comprehending and engaging with class content – commonly referred to as the “reading-to-learn” stage.
As students advance through school, they will further hone these skills by engaging with progressively more complex texts. This continual development spans their academic journey and extends beyond, predominantly through the practice of silent reading.
Silent reading fluency is the skill that is taught the least yet tested the most.
Students rely on their silent reading skills daily, spanning across all academic subjects. Consequently, a lack of proficiency in reading directly impacts their learning capabilities in every subject. They are crucial during critical assessments like SATs and end-of-year evaluations.
Data has indicated that silent reading fluency is a common struggle for many students.
- 70% of nonproficient students are not fluent in silent reading.
- 30% of proficient students are not fluent in silent reading.
Why is silent reading fluency overlooked so frequently?
Teachers are skilled at identifying students’ challenges during oral reading. However, spotting these signs during silent reading can be more challenging.
Early readers have a small visual span and can only see a few letters at a time. They also haven’t developed eye movements that naturally move from left to right, knowing where to land on words. Upon analysing eye-movement recordings of student reading sessions, researchers observed common traits among those who exhibit inefficiencies in their reading habits. These tendencies include:
- Make many extra fixations or eye stops.
- Move very short distances and make regressive eye movements.
- Move backwards to check words or confirm what they saw.
- Invest a lot of time trying to move their eyes to the right place within the text.
As a result, reading becomes exhausting, and making sense of the content becomes difficult.
This example shows a non-fluent Year 8 student reading at a pace of about 140 words per minute. This student is reading at a Year 3 level. As this reader regresses back across the text, the words scramble, and the reader must reorder the words before trying to comprehend the content. This extra work leads to low comprehension levels and low motivation.
All of this extra energy is largely invisible to teachers. Without insight into these inefficiencies, teachers may not intervene, and students will struggle in classes for years.
Methods to improve silent reading fluency.
Becoming a fluent reader enables a student to focus more on comprehension, reading increasingly complex texts, and becoming a more confident and engaged reader. Educators can use technology to guide and support this work.
There are three critical elements to drive reading fluency:
- Targeted instruction – Reading solutions with embedded assessments can help identify each student’s strengths and weaknesses. This data should inform fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, confidence, and interest. With greater access to student data, educators have insight into where students are and what they need to grow further.
Reading Plus offers a silent reading assessment (InSight), which is used to screen students, identify individual instructional needs, place students within the programme, and evaluate their progress over time. The InSight assessment measures reading motivation, vocabulary knowledge, comprehension, and reading rate.
Structured practice
To improve their reading skills, students need to engage in targeted practice sessions that focus on the specific areas requiring development. Technology can match students with the right content for their fluency levels and adapt to ensure they remain within their zone of proximal development. As they build skills in every area, technology should provide personalised scaffolds and support based on student behaviour and needs.
The Reading Plus Learning Guided Window™ provides personalised, structured practices by moving according to the rate at which a student reads and adapts based on the student’s performance with comprehension questions. The Guided Window makes reading comfortable by scaffolding the silent reading process, freeing up the mental energy needed for the ultimate goal of reading: comprehension.
Student engagement
Students should have the choice and control to pursue knowledge. By allowing students to select the content that interests them most, educators empower them to build their skills in the most meaningful way and motivate them to become lifelong readers. This means providing diverse content with mirrors, windows, and doors. Students can see themselves and others within the text and learn about new experiences.
The Reading component of Reading Plus offers students a wide and diverse choice of curated text selections that align with their reading proficiency level and interests. All of the text selections provide rich educational content. They are intended to deepen knowledge of familiar topics and broaden students’ horizons by introducing new topics.
How does Reading Plus help with silent reading fluency?
Reading Plus is the only adaptive literacy tool that addresses the hidden hurdle of inefficient silent reading.
Reading Plus focuses on fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary – three of the five essential pillars of reading. These three pillars are critical as pupils shift from the learning-to-read stage to the reading-to-learn stage of reading development – ultimately leading them to become proficient readers who can effectively use reading for learning at their expected level.
The programme also focuses on pupils’ intrinsic motivation for reading by measuring their individual self-improvement beliefs, confidence, and interest in reading. All of these components come together to develop reading proficiency.
Interested in learning more about how Reading Plus is the only reading solution to address silent reading fluency directly? Enquire with the form below.
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