Endless Phonics: Fluency

FLUENCY

Are you worried that your child’s reading is too slow and laborious, or lacks expression?

This page is for you.

“Fluency” is the technical term for natural, effortless reading at the passage level. It is an advanced reading skill and relies on a strong foundation of many other subskills. If you are concerned that your child is not reading fluently, this page will help walk you through what fluency is, how to assess it, when to worry and when not to worry, and what to do if you find that your child’s fluency is low.

Basically, this page contains everything you ever wanted to know about fluency, and probably a fair bit more (sorry-not-sorry about that).

Jump to: Assessing Fluency | Problems & Solutions

What is Fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read:

Accurately
Quickly
With Expression (this is sometimes referred to as “prosody”)

Fluent reading sounds natural and effortless, as if the reader were having a conversation with you.

If your child is not reading fluently, it may interfere with their reading comprehension. Disfluent readers are also typically unmotivated to read, because reading is such a struggle.

Fluency is an advanced reading ability. Beginning readers must first develop at least some proficiency in the foundational skills of reading: phonics (letter-sound knowledge), phonemic awareness (the ability to segment, blend and manipulate individual sounds in words) and decoding (sounding out words) prior to becoming fluent readers. They must gain some letter-level automaticity and word-level automaticity BEFORE phrase-level, sentence-level, and passage-level fluency can be meaningfully addressed.

Want to dive in? Watch this video presentation from the Fluency Guru: Jan Hasbrouck.

Videos: Building Fluent Readers - Jan Hasbrouck (5 min) | Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours) | Prosody - Tim Rasinski (2 min) | Discovering the Path to Fluency - Tim Rasinski (35 min) | Reading Fluency - Cox Campus FREE Course (2-3 hours) |

Assessing Fluency

How do you know if your kiddo is reading fluently enough?

First, keep in mind that even if your child’s fluency is low, you may not need to focus on fluency interventions yet. Your child must have some foundational skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding before fluency can be truly addressed. This is why fluency is not often measured formally in Kindergarten.

Quick Clues that Fluency is Low:

Sounding out words letter-by-letter
Slow, staccato reading, where a passage is read like a list of words
Expressionless “robot” reading
Exhaustion after reading for several minutes.

However, it is incredibly important to note that in order for students to read well, they must go through a sounding out phase. It is this sounding out process which wires the brain for reading. Read more about How the Brain Reads.

Formal Measures of Fluency: Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)

Fluency is typically measured using an Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) assessment. A teacher or evaluator can perform this for you (and may have a number for you already). This is also something you can get an estimate of on your own.

Oral Reading Fluency is measured by the number of words a student reads correctly per minute (WCPM) on a grade-level passage.

In addition to ORF, you will find it valuable to make some notes about your child’s expressiveness when reading. You can simply monitor their pauses, use an extensive prosody rubric, or something in-between. I usually go with something on the simpler side unless the kiddo doesn’t show progress in this area despite increasing rate and accuracy.

How Do I Take an ORF Measurement?

How do you administer an ORF assessment? Essentially, you will listen to your child read a grade-level passage for one minute, mark any mistakes or 3-second hesitations as errors, then tally how many words they read correctly in one minute (see this quick video example). They should not have practiced or seen the passage before.

There are several reputable sources for obtaining free ORF materials and passages online, including DIBELS and EasyCBM. Be sure to familiarize yourself with their administration guide. It will walk you through the entire process for introducing the assessment and for error marking procedures. Use the exact procedure as written in the guide for accurate results.

Note that ORF is measured from First Grade onward. In Kindergarten, students are expected to be focusing on phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding, so their fluency is often low and not worth measuring.

When taking an ORF, I prefer to administer three passages, score each one, and take the average of the scores. If doing this, just be sure to check the passage you use to see if it's for the Beginning/BOY (Beginning of Year), Middle/MOY (Middle of Year), or End/EOY (End of Year). While some passages may use the Beginning/BOY method to mark this, others simply use decimal numeration (eg 2.1 for the first passage in Grade 2, and 2.2 for the second passage in Grade 2, etc). This information will usually be in the teacher or “scoring” version of the passage, not the student version. You may need to use passages from multiple sources if you wish to take the average of three while sticking to the beginning/middle/end of year alignment.

Free ORF Assessment Instructions and Passages:

DIBELS and EasyCBM are two sets of materials put out by the University of Oregon that have reliable and widely used measures for assessing students’ ORF. They include many other assessments as well, such as Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) lists.

DIBELS 8.0
Many schools use the University of Oregon’s DIBELS ORF for benchmarking (measuring student performance against standards or peers), and progress monitoring.

DIBELS 8.0 Administration Guide - Directions
See pages 76-80 for the ORF directions. There are other tests and complicated scoring systems involved in DIBELS. You don’t need to bother with those if all you want is ORF. Just follow the brief directions for the ORF.

DIBELS 8.0 Materials & Scoring Booklets
These will come as .ZIP files by grade.

There are benchmarking passages for BOY/MOY/EOY and progress monitoring passages for assessing inbetween.

In each grade level packet, among other testing materials, you will find several Oral Reading Fluency Passages. The Scoring Booklet contains the parent/teacher version of the ORF passages. These have helpful information on them such as the time of year to use the passage for assessment (i.e. beginning, middle, end of year), the script you will read to your kiddo before they begin, and the word count of the passage pre-tallied for you, line-by-line, for fast scoring.

The Materials zip files will contain the student version of the passages.

For ORF, you will NOT need the “Maze” files within the zip. You will also not need the NWF portions of the packet.

EasyCBM

This resource, also put out by the University of Oregon, has additional grade-level passages that you can use to calculate ORF once you are familiar with the process.

How Fluent is Fluent Enough?
How Does My Child Compare?

A great deal of real-world fluency data has been collected and compiled by researchers, so we now have a very good idea what an “average” ORF words-correct-per-minute looks like for each grade level. These are called Fluency Norms.

An average student (in the “50th percentile”) in the middle of 1st Grade will read grade-level material at about 30 wcpm. By 6th Grade, the average student will read 145 wcpm. College graduates have ORFs only slightly above this when reading complex “grade level material” - an average of about 150 wcpm (Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017, Rasinski, 2022)

The tables linked below contain WCPM values arranged by Grade and “Percentile.” Keep in mind that faster is not always better. Jan Hasbrouck, the researcher behind many of these fluency studies, notes that an ORF at or above the 50th Percentile would be considered fluent reading. Because both slow reading AND overly fast reading can result in loss of comprehension, she suggests that achieving an ORF in the 50th-75th percentile is an ideal target ( Hasbrouck, 2020, Hasbrouck, 2023 ).

If a student reads a bit faster or a bit slower but enjoys reading, and has good comprehension, that’s perfectly fine. Remember, the end goal for our kiddos is comprehension and enjoyment, not speed.

Oral Reading Fluency Norms Tables

What is a typical ORF for each grade level? Click through to see the table.

Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017)

So how fluent is fluent enough? If your child is around or above the 50th percentile for ORF, and/or if they appear to be fairly comfortable reading at their pace, and understand what they are reading, your kiddo is probably doing just fine.

Podcasts: Fluency isn’t Just About Speed - Jan Hasbrouck & The Measured Mom |
Videos: Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours) |

Pinpointing the Problem:

Why is Fluency Low? What Can We Do About It?

So what do you do if your child’s fluency is below average?

It might NOT be a “fluency” intervention.

… wait, what?

Fluency is a very complex aspect of reading to remediate because accurate, swift, expressive reading is built upon a foundation of other skills. A child needs to have accurate, automatic phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding skills before they will be able to read fluently at the passage level. Beyond this, there are several other factors that can come into play when talking about fluency issues.

Problems and Solutions:

Check Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, and Decoding Skills
These form the foundation of reading. If there are deficits in these areas, you will want an intervention targeted here.

This is the #1, most fundamental issue to look at with regards to fluency.

Most children with fluency issues, and particularly students with dyslexia, will very very often have gaps in phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding skills which must be remediated before fluency will improve significantly. Use a Structured Literacy approach to remediate these issues. Know your options. Structured Literacy approaches include, OG, Direct Instruction, and Speech-to-Print. The speech-to-print approaches tend to be more efficient, intuitive, and effective for most students. Stay tuned for my post on Phonics, Phonemic Awareness and Decoding.

RAN
RAN stands for Rapid Automatized Naming. It refers to the speed at which someone is able to identify objects or letters. Current research indicates that we cannot change RAN directly. If your child’s evaluation states that RAN is low, be aware that they may need extra practice to reach automaticity with words and fluency at the passage level, and some kiddos with low RAN may continue to read slightly slower than the average student.
Word Attack Cognitive Load
Consider what your child has been taught when it comes to decoding words. In this case less between the child and the page is more. This is (nearly) all the guidance they need: “Sound it out. Try another sound there.” Many phonics programs unfortunately approach long words by attempting to use what are called “syllable division rules” to guide pronunciation. This can be incredibly cognitively demanding for children. If a child has to pause at every long word and consider how to divide the syllables, and which syllable rules apply, their brain gets overloaded. Reading speed crawls to a standstill and their fluency plummets. Syllable division rules have an added downside in that the syllable rules don’t work very often, so the time spent teaching these rules is not very fruitful. Children must develop Set for Variability to successfully tackle long words (listen to The Measured Mom’s podcast on SfV). What is Set for Variability? Basically, it means developing the knowledge and ability to rapidly adjust sounds in words to arrive at the correct pronunciation. Some programs that teach using Set for Variability and without syllable rules are "Speech-To-Print" or "Structured Linguistic Literacy" programs. What is Speech-to-Print? You can find my S2P 101 doc here. Learn more about Cognitive Load and reading. Also listen to this podcast on Cognitive Load Theory from the Measured Mom. Stay tuned for my post on Reading and Cognitive Load.
Guessing
Is your child guessing words based on picture clues, context, or the first letter? This can lead to inaccurate reading, slow reading (due to having to go back and correct themselves), and reading comprehension issues. For many years, schools thought that teaching students the poor strategy of guessing words from pictures, context, and the first letter was the right way to teach reading (see Is My Kid Learning to Read? Part 1 and Part 2). This process teaches students to deprioritize the letters and sounds, and guess instead (unfortunately, we now know that this is not a good approach ). Most students will never become fluent readers using this method. We now understand the neuroscience of reading; guessing is not how our brain learns to read. Yet many many schools still teach using these so-called MSV, Three-Cueing or “Balanced Literacy” methods today, so be hypervigilant. Posters and "reading strategies" like these are a red flag that your school may be using these outdated, ineffective methods to teach reading: Stuck on a Word? DON'T use these strategies Red Flags - Why Three Cueing is Ineffective - by Five From Five

What if your school teaches guessing? What should you do if your child’s school isn’t teaching reading right? Do not let your child guess words. Slay the Guessing Monster. In order for effortless reading to develop, words must be sounded-out many times so that they are properly imprinted and "orthographically mapped" in the brain. If you or your child sees posters or methods like the above in school, tell your child:

“Those guessing strategies are for kids who don’t know how to read, but in our house, we are learning to READ. You are becoming a reader, so you don’t need to guess the word. Just try your best to sound it out! I’ll help you if you get stuck.”

This is how the brain learns to read. By sounding-out. If a child makes an error when sounding out the word, point to the letter they mispronounced and ask what other sound the letter can make, or simply tell them the sound. Then have them sound out the word again properly (here are some tips). Use a structured literacy approach that incorporates phonics, phonemic awareness and decoding practice to teach your child to read. After a number of repetitions, your child will have stored the letter-sound relationships of the word in their long term memory. This is referred to as orthographic mapping. Once this has occurred, your child will recognize the word instantly on sight, and will no longer have to sound out. Importantly, this is not the same as rote memorization. The words must be sounded out multiple times for true orthographic mapping and storage in long term memory to occur. Read more about How the Brain Reads. Stay tuned for my post on Phonics, Phonemic Awareness and Decoding.

Lack of Comprehension
If your child doesn’t understand the vocabulary or phrases in a passage, they will struggle to read with true fluency. Deficits in this area may or may not impact your child’s ORF accuracy and rate, but it will very likely impact their ability to read with expression. Reading Comprehension and Fluency have a reciprocal relationship. It’s difficult to understand what you are reading if you read too slowly, but you can’t read with swift, fluent expression if you do not understand what you are reading. Some kiddos who struggle in this department may simply need to build up their understanding of complex sentence structures and vocabulary. Others may have more substantial underlying issues such as Hyperlexia or Developmental Language Disorder (see below). Stay tuned for my post on Reading Comprehension.
Other Underlying Issues That Impact Fluency
Some children have underlying issues or “co-morbidities” (beyond dyslexia!) that can interfere with fluent reading. Do not under-estimate the impact that these can have on your child’s reading. Here are some of the most common issues:

Vision Issues
If a kiddo has issues with their eyesight, reading is going to remain a struggle. The trouble is, not all vision issues are picked up at an eye exam with a general practitioner. One particularly common culprit that impacts reading and can occur even if a kiddo has 20/20 vision is Convergence Insufficiency (CI). While there are self-screening tests you can do at home, you will want to contact an optometrist to diagnose (Note: optometrists and opthamologists do not necessarily include this as part of a standard eye exam, so be sure you ask). Convergence Insufficiency is 3x more common in children with ADHD compared to the general population (16% vs 2-3%).

Visual Processing Deficits
Some kiddos have issues not with vision per se, but with their brain’s visual or visuo-attentional processing system. In these cases, their brain has trouble processing visual information swiftly, keeping that information in order, and tuning out “noise” (surrounding letters). These issues, sometimes called tracking errors, often are more noticeable when children are reading passage-level text, rather than words in isolation. There are many, many different visual processing issues that can occur. Two common ones are letter position issues, and attentional issues, where a kiddo’s brain accidentally swaps letters (see this example).

For example, a child might read:

“form” as “from” or “cane dome” as “cone dame”

In a block of text, letters from the next word, or from the line below might inadvertently be tacked onto or dropped into the target word. For example, in the following phrase, the two <s> might migrate so that the brain interprets: “As he said” as being: “A shes aid.” If you notice your child making these sorts of errors when reading, they may have a visual processing deficit. A developmental optometrist should be able to diagnose this conclusively. Extra spacing between words, double-spacing of text, larger font, and blocking off surrounding words with cardboard can help children with these issues. In terms of intervention, there are many (often expensive) vision therapy approaches out there. Your optometrist may recommend one that is tailored to your child’s specific needs. You might also consider more affordable alternatives. This free intervention had significant results in multiple randomized controlled trials, and helped my own children immensely. Stay tuned for my post on Visual Processing. Attention Deficits

Related to visuo-attentional deficits, kiddos with ADHD may struggle to keep their place in text, or inadvertently skip over words, parts of words, or punctuation. Read more about ADHD and reading. Working Memory Issues If a kiddo has issues with their working memory, they'll have trouble holding multiple pieces of information in their head at once. This can cause problems for them when they are sounding out long words (quick tip - use continuous or successive blending). It can also trip them up when trying to make sense of long sentences or passages. Many ADHD kiddos also have working memory issues.

Hyperlexia
Children with hyperlexia read swiftly and accurately, but lack expression because they do not understand what they are reading. Most often, this phenomenon co-occurs with autism/ASD. Read more about Hyperlexia. Do keep in mind that even skilled readers sometimes also selectively let their mind wander while reading, and that this can be a reason that passages are read without expression; they aren't paying attention, and simply need to be.

Developmental Language Disorder
Approximately 7% of children have DLD - a disorder which impacts the ability to understand and use complex language (oral or written). This affects not only reading and writing, but listening and speaking, and is different from dyslexia or ADHD. Read more about DLD.

Fluency Intervention!

Once all of the above issues are actively being addressed, what most kids need to improve their reading fluency is practice, practice, and more practice reading aloud. It will take a fair bit of practice for kiddos to increase their reading fluency.

Repeated Reading
The most widely used, tried-and-true method for improving fluency once the above issues have been addressed is Repeated Reading. Quite simply, this means having students read the same short passage aloud multiple times, with immediate corrective feedback from you. A general guideline is a 50-250 word passage, read 2-3 times.

If this sounds boring to you, you might be pleasantly surprised when you try it with a child. It’s not as boring as it sounds! When children are still struggling to become fluent readers, their first reading of the text will often be slow and laborious. When they read it again, they will be encouraged at how much their reading improves the second time around. Expression will be improved further if, after the first read, you do a comprehension check and/or a retell ( “Whoa, okay, so what just happened there?” ) and discuss the passage.

There are a few variations of repeated reading that you can try if you want to spice things up. Check out EBLI’s Read, Read Back, and Read Again technique for supported reading, or get your kids acting with Reader’s Theater, funny voices, or poetry slams. You can also try partner reading, echo reading, or choral reading.

If you don’t mind a screen-based program, you might try Read Naturally, or if you want a book of activities, you could try The Megabook of Fluency (be aware though, that some of these activities focus on automaticity at the word level, not the passage level), there are also these fluency activities, and even more fluency-building ideas.

Corrective Feedback The key with any of these approaches is to provide immediate, corrective feedback to your kiddo when and if they make a mistake. Here is an example video that demonstrates several error correction techniques which you can draw from. The important thing is to ensure that the kiddos are the ones doing the work of reading the passage.

Initially, and with harder words, you may need to give them more feedback: “You’re right! this letter CAN say [that] sound, but here it says [this] sound.” Framing things in a positive light by pointing out what they did right will help with motivation. Later on, you should be able to simply tap beneath the letter and/or say “Hmm?” or “Whoops,” or “Try that one again,” and they will have the skills to self-correct. Here are some more tips for error correction. You'll likely also find it useful to take this wonderful free parents' course from Sounds-Write. Tackling Long Words:
If your kiddo is getting fairly automatic with short words but struggling to tackle longer words, here are a two approaches that can help: Sound-Out-By-Chunk Breaking up words into chunks by spoken syllable (natural spoken syllable breaks, not by rules), can really help make long words less daunting. Check out One Easy Strategy for Multisyllabic Words, and Syllables, R Controlled Vowels, and Phonics Instruction and Polysyllabic Words. You can also read more about the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches at: What Helps Kids read and spell multisyllable words? and at Phonics and Syllable Rules, Do We Need Them? (short answer: nope!) Map the Morphemes Morphemes are the "meaningful chunks" of words. They are the building blocks of the English language that the scribes used to construct written English long ago. The most well known of the morphemes are "prefixes" and "suffixes." Morphemes have largely stable spellings and because of this can be orthographically mapped for instant recognition in a similar way that whole words can (listen to this podcast with a star-studded cast of reading gurus for more about how teaching Morphology can help make long words Sight Words). As adults, we have all probably done this with many morphemes such as < re- > ("reuse, reinvent, reformat"). Morphemes are meaningful word chunks that, when we can rapidly identify them, we can use them to quickly sound out and make sense of complex words such as 'reaccreditation' and 'representationalism.' Explicitly teaching kiddos to automatically identify prefixes, suffixes, and base morphemes can really help them when tackling longer words. One fabulous (and free!) program that you can use to help accomplish this is the morphological fluency program Word Connections by Dr. Jessica Toste. Personally, I use the Word Connections activities alongside my phonics program when doing intervention with older kiddos. I adapted the scope and sequence to match that of my phonics program (my spreadsheet of words lists is here).

Don’t Stress

Fluency is an advanced reading skill, and it takes time to develop. Knowing where and why hiccups can occur will help you to help your child.

As we saw in the ORF tables above, competent readers may read at a broad range of speeds. The important thing is getting your child up to a threshold where they feel comfortable reading, and where they can understand what they read.

Speed is not the end goal. Comprehension and enjoyment are.

Questions or Comments?

Don't hesitate to drop me a comment below!

Additional Resources

Further Reading: Repeated Readings - Reading Simplified | Evidence Based Fluency Instruction - Five from Five | Reading Fluency - Nathaniel Hansford | Reading Fluency Instruction - MultiLit | Repeated Reading - MultiLit | Reading Fluency - Timothy Rasinski | Everything You Wanted to Know About Repeated Reading - Tim Shanahan | Improve Fluency and Comprehension by Providing Supported Reading - EBLI | The 411 on 4 Types of Reading Errors - Reading Simplified |

Academic Articles: Repeated Reading Meta-Analysis - Therrien (2004) | The Complex Nature of Reading Fluency - Hudson et al. (2008) |

Podcasts: What to Do After Administering the ORF | Implementing Reader’s Theatre - The Measured Mom | Revisiting Fluency Assessment and Instruction - Jan Hasbrouck |

Videos: Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours) | Building Fluent Readers - Jan Hasbrouck (5 min) | Fluency: Key to Comprehension - Jan Hasbrouck (1.5 hours) | Improve Fluency & Comprehension Webinar - EBLI | Prosody - Tim Rasinski (2 min) | Discovering the Path to Fluency - Tim Rasinski (35 min) |

Fluency

FLUENCY

What is Fluency?

Assessing Fluency

Pinpointing the Problem:

Why is Fluency Low? What Can We Do About It?

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