Good readers have one huge characteristic in common. They all spend a significant amount of time actively practicing their skill. Reading is a “participation sport.” In other words, we all have to DO reading to become more fluent in our reading. What gets practiced, improves.

Although many people may associate fluency with beginning readers, all of us – adults included – have different levels of fluency depending on the content we are reading. When proficient readers are presented with text that is different from what we normally read or which contains specialized terms or vocabulary, our fluency level also goes down as we have to attend to the words and meaning more carefully. For example, if you are not a lawyer or a mortgage broker, reading the typical contract or mortgage paperwork is out of your comfort level. To comprehend this material, you would have to slow down and concentrate on making meaning. In other words, your fluency would suffer since you do not read this type of material on a regular basis and have not been trained in the type of writing or the vocabulary that might be used in this type of text. On the other hand, if this is your profession and you regularly read this type of document, you would have little trouble fluently reading this text.

Since fluency improves with use, the best way to help our students improve their fluency with text is to provide as many opportunities as possible for them to actively read and practice their reading skill. Just as we wouldn’t expect to improve in playing the piano or learning tennis or any other “participation sport” without practice, we can’t expect children to improve in their reading without reading. How many ways can you find to increase the time children actually spend reading either in the home or at school? The more the practice, the better they will become. The formula for reading and fluency improvement couldn’t be more simple!