Development of reading fluency is one of the most significant and important steps in the process of personal development and achievement of professional and educational goals. There are many definitions to cover the issue, and the most advanced was developed by Meyer and Felton, who defined reading fluency as “the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly, and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading, such as decoding (Reading Fluency, 2001; What is reading fluency?).”
Reading fluency is very important for every person because of numerous reasons. First of all, it provides a kind of link or connection between recognition of the words and comprehension.
Secondly, those readers who possess technique of fluent reading become able to focus their attention on various issues which are related to the understanding of the text. On the contrary, those readers who are not fluent tend to focus their attention on figuring out some words, so they do not pay much attention to the comprehension issues (Reading Fluency).
Since reading fluency is so important, there were developed various areas of the discipline which were aimed at development of various techniques to promote reading fluency and at the assessment of the results.
Despite the fact what strategy of development of reading fluency and what technique of assessment is chosen when it comes to development of fluency, there are a range of steps which should be followed. These are:
Measuring fluency of reading of the students;
Setting individual goals of fluency for each of the students;
Selecting appropriate texts which are aimed at fluency building instruction;
Devoting enough time to fluent reading modeling;
Providing corrections, feedback and effective opportunities to promote development of fluent reading;
Assessing reading fluency systematically and regularly;
Using both formal and informal measures;
Establishment of baseline data;
Monitoring progress of the students (Reading Fluency).
When the process of development of fluent reading is completed, the students are expected to recognize the worlds they read automatically. This particular characteristic allows them to make their reading fast, smooth, more expressive. Moreover, fluent reading possession allows reading silently which makes the speed of reading twice higher.
There are two common approaches which area aimed at improvement of fluency – these are direct and indirect ones. Both of them are aimed at usage of free time in order to become engaged into voluntary readings (Fluency & Learning to Read – Reading Fluency; Reading fluency activities).
The direct approach, which has been already mentioned above, involves repeated readings as the most effective technique. Using it, students continue repeating reading each of the texts provided by the teacher till they read it fluently.
This technique is especially effective for the readers who only know how to decode some words, that is are full alphabetic. In this technique it is very important to sue decodable texts, but not those which are predictable.
As for the indirect approach, it gives the students an opportunity to read and receive pleasure of reading. Each leaner chooses a …