Automaticity, Fluency and Wide Reading

In our previous blog, which discussed word recognition and phonics, we stressed the importance of students’ learning to use their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to sound out unknown words. It is absolutely critical that they learn to do so. However, at some point—typically around the end of second grade—students need to move beyond sounding out words. They need to progress to recognizing words automatically and to reading fluently. They also need begin reading widely.

• Automaticity is the ability to recognize words instantly and without conscious attention. Achieving automaticity is crucial because the mind’s capacity to process information is limited. If students must consciously attend to each word, they will not be able to process other aspects of a text—the meanings of sentences and larger units.

• Fluency is the ability to read a text smoothly and with appropriate intonation. The relationship between fluency and automaticity is complicated but in a way reciprocal. Students need to automatically recognize most words in a text in order to read it fluently; yet the same practices that built fluency also build automaticity.

• For most students, reading widely in texts that are not too challenging and that they find interesting and enjoyable is the best route to automaticity and to fluency. Other students will require a more focused approach to achieve these goals.

In addition to describing automaticity and fluency in some detail, Chapter 9 of Teaching Reading in the 21st Centurydescribes the two major paths to these goals. The primary route is wide reading, and much of the chapter deals with ways of fostering wide and independent reading, which also builds students’ vocabularies, world knowledge, and the desire to read more. Additionally, the chapter describes various methods of repeated reading, a more focused approach to fostering automaticity and fluency that some students may need.