How to Improve Reading Fluency in Beginning Readers

Intervention for Individual Students

• 1

  Select a text that is easy for the child to read. The child should be able to read the text with a 95 percent or higher accuracy rate.

• 2

  Model appropriate phrasing and explain how reading sounds better when words are read together in phrases. A useful prompt is " Read these words together like this" (cover part of the print and read a phrase).

• 3

  Write simple sentences from the text on sentence strips. Cut the sentence apart into separate words and arrange the words in phrases. Have the student read the phrases. The sentence "The pig rolled around in the mud" can be arranged in phrases as follows:

  The pig

  rolled around

  in the mud.

• 4

  Model how to read punctuation. Point out that a comma means slow down and a period means to stop. Explain how quotation marks are used. Also, model how the voice rises at the end of a question and goes down at the end of a sentence. A simple sentence repeated with different punctuation will demonstrate the effect of punctuation.

  Dogs bark. Dogs bark? Dogs bark!

• 5

  Select texts with rhythm and rhyme. Practicing lines from books such as "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" can help to build fluency. Students follow the rhythm of the text and naturally begin to read in phrases.