Fluency

Fluency refers to a person’s ability to read accurately and quickly while maintaining a smooth, expressive sound. Fluent readers are able to do two things at once—decode and comprehend. Fluency is often looked at as the bridge between word recognition and comprehension because when a reader doesn’t need to allocate cognitive resources for figuring out unknown words, they are able to think about what the text means. Fluency is developed in young readers through repetition and independent reading practice with easy and just-right texts. When readers are disfluent, it is a good indicator that the text they are reading is too difficult.