This paper is a consideration of Steven A. Stahl's (2004), "What Do We Know About Fluency?" and a look at how that relates to the work I have been doing in my kindergarten class.
Stahl (2004) writes, "Conventionally, for reading to be fluent, it should be 1) accurate (without too many miscues), 2) at a reasonable rate, and 3) prosodic (read with enough expression that it sounds like language)" (p. 187). To this definition, he adds the condition that the child should also be comprehending what he or she is reading, and notes that a slower reader may still be able to understand enough of the text's meaning to be considered at least basically fluent. He (2005) also notes, "Oral reading accuracy may be important only in the early grades, with other factors such as vocabulary and comprehension strategy use becoming important later on" (p. 188), but he concludes that this means first and second grades (p. 197), not necessarily earlier than that.
Stahl (2004) goes on to outline the effectiveness of a number of different teaching techniques, concluding, "Assisted approaches, such as listening while reading, seem to be more effective than nonassisted approaches, such as repeated reading" (p. 192). He argues that teacher involvement is critical to developing fluency.
In my classroom, most of my students are what might be called "pre-fluent." They are still working to master the skills that they will need to become fluent. For instance, they cannot yet be reliably accurate in identifying words because they are still developing phonemic awareness. They are starting to understand how sounds relate to pictures and then to the letters that symbolize those pictures. They are beginning to recognize high frequency words, such as "the," "and," "will," and "he" or "she." Until they are able to be accurate consistently, they cannot start to demonstrate these skills quickly enough. Yet this work is an essential foundation for the f...