Chapter 10: Fluency and Automaticity

In Chapter 10, Beers discusses the importance of fluency and automaticity in reading and offers suggestions on how to increase these skills in struggling readers. Automaticity is that ability to do something quickly without a lot of conscious thinking about the task. Reading, for most of us is an example. Same with driving, we do not have to think too much about how to drive when we need to go to the grocery store. Reading automaticity refers to a reader’s ability to recognize words without conscious decoding. It means that when we read, we recognize words as entire units, and we recognize words quickly and accurately. Students don’t develop automaticity through decoding, but rather by repeated exposure to a word they are already able to decode. I find it interesting that because I am a fluent reader, and have been reading for so many years, I struggle with decoding. I am having an awful difficult time in my phonics course, trying to learn how to teach the basics of reading.  

Automaticity leads to fluency---the ability to read smoothly and easily at a good pace with good phrasing and expression. Fluency develops over time as students word recognition skills improve. Beers provides us with two ways to measure fluency in our students on pages 209-211. Beers also gives us several suggestions to use in a classroom to help improve our reader’s fluency. Her first suggestion is to use sight words. The Dolch Basic Sight Vocabulary contains 220 words that are high-frequency. My cooperating field experience used this with her struggling readers and it really seemed to help. Another suggestion to increase fluency is to ensure that students are hearing text. This can be done by reading to your students, echo reading, choral reading, etc. Students need to hear fluent reading in order to become fluent readers. Aside from many other suggestions Beers provides, one that I find interesting is to prompt students, and not correct them. I absolutely agree with this suggestion, but believe it is easier said than done. It is so easier to just tell a student what the word they are struggling on is instead of providing them with a prompt to decode it. Every since I was in school, I can remember teachers simply telling me or my peers what a word is if we were stumbling on it. I will remember this when working with my struggling readers in the future.

Finally, we can’t stress enough that nonfluent readers are most often nonfluent because of a lack of practice with reading. Students need ample time to read, read, read. It is also a great idea to try to get students reading for leisure on their own time. The more practice the readers have, the better readers they will become, more quickly. As a future invention specialist, it is also important to note that struggling readers need to see a word as many as forty times before remembering it, compared to the ten times that fluent readers need.