All Oral Reading Practice Is Not Equal or How Can I Integrate Fluency Into My Classroom?

This paper discusses fluency's role in reading development and suggests ways of incorporating fluency instruction into the literacy curriculum through a range of oral reading approaches. It concentrates on two distinct groups of learners: students who are making the shift to fluent reading (generally second and third graders) and those who have experienced difficulty making this transition (usually in fourth grade and beyond). As such, it presents approaches that can supplement a given literacy curriculum as well as approaches that can serve as the basis of a shared reading program. This range of instructional methods should assist both groups of learners in making the transition from purposeful decoding and monotonous reading to automatic word recognition and the expressive rendering of text.