Fluency with Text: An Overview

An overview of fluency with text, including what it is, what it looks like, and why it is important for effective literacy skills.

What do we mean when we talk about fluency?

Fluency with text is reading words with no noticeable cognitive or mental effort. It’s when the fundamental skills are so "automatic" that it doesn’t require conscious attention.

So, what does that mean exactly?

Let’s give some examples. People can perform many tasks with automaticity, or automatically like walking, riding a bike, or driving a car.

Fluency, like riding a bike, develops through practice.Students go from sounding out individual letters and letter combinations, to reading words quickly and effortlessly, with lots of opportunities for practice until reading the words can be performed with a high rate of success.

Fluency in Oral Reading

Fluency in oral reading has 3 parts:

• Accuracy, which is reading with few errors.

• Reading speed, or the rate at which a student reads.

• Prosody, or the skill of reading aloud with proper intonation, phrasing, and expression.

To be a fluent reader, all three of these components must be in place.

So, what do fluent readers look like?

Fluency research says that successful readers rely primarily on the letters in the words rather than context or pictures to identify familiar and unfamiliar words. They process virtually every letter. They use letter-sound correspondences to identify words. They have a reliable strategy for decoding words.And they read words a sufficient number of times for words to become automatic.

Why should we focus on fluency?

To gain meaning from text, students must read fluently. Proficient readers are so automatic with each component skill (phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary) that they focus their attention on constructing meaning from the print.

These component skills need to be well developed to support understanding. It is not enough to be simply accurate; the skill must be automatic. So, fluency is not an end in itself but is the bridge to comprehension.Fluent reading frees up cognitive resources to better process the meaning of the words.

How to Build Fluency

Effective fluency instruction should include repeated readings, or practice, with passages that the student can read with a high level of accuracy. It should be brief, about 15 to 30 minutes, it should include corrective feedback, students should be able to set goals and graph progress, and teachers should keep in mind that fluency is only part of the bigger picture.

SUGGESTED CITATION

National Center on Improving Literacy. (2025). Fluency with Text: An Overview. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs. Retrieved from improvingliteracy.org.