Goal
4
Teaching Fluency
Reading with Phrasing, Intonation,
and Automaticity
• Why is this goal important?
Some argue there is a chicken-and-egg relationship between fluency and comprehension. By reading at an appropriate pace, with proper phrasing and with intonation,
expression, and emphasis on the correct words, a reader both communicates that the
text is making sense and makes sense of the reading (Rasinski 2010, Kuhn 2008). Try
to read a text in a staccato, word-by-word, monotone fashion and you will soon discover you understood and remember very few if any of the words you said aloud.
There are exceptions to this rule of fluency and comprehension being inextricably linked. Have you ever met that child who reads a text sounding like he is reading
lines for a Broadway audition, only to stop, be asked a simple question about what
he just read, and have him tell you he doesn’t remember a thing? It’s important that
in our attempts to teach children to read fluently, we don’t send the message that
reading is just about performing.
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There are a few parts to this goal of reading fluency:
•phrasing or parsing—putting words together into meaningful groups
within a sentence
•expression or intonation or prosody—reading to match the feeling of the
piece, paying attention to ending punctuation and dialogue marks
•emphasis—emphasizing words in the sentence to match the author’s
meaning; paying attention to text treatments (for example: bold, italics,
or all caps)
•automaticity—reading known words automatically
•pace—reading at a pace that mirrors how we talk, not racing through
words or reading at a labored rate.
• How do I know if this goal is right
for my student?
We wouldn’t expect readers at the lowest levels (A, B, C) to read with fluency, as their
focus should be on one-to-one matching (reading one word aloud for each word in
print) and pointing under the words—reading smoothly and this goal cannot live
side by side. However, by level D, we should expect some phrasing, with a couple or
a few words in each phrase, and by level E, we should expect some intonation as well.
At levels E, F, and G, it’s appropriate to help students practice their fluency, though
we may not expect perfect fluency as students are still learning to integrate sources of
information and work on their print work strategies (see Chapter 3; Joseph Yukish,
personal communication, 2014).
I’m not a fan of determining fluency as a goal by holding up a stopwatch as kids
read because I believe that children often start to view reading aloud as performance and they stop monitoring for meaning, invalidating the assessment overall,
or they feel pressured and the results are skewed by their anxiety. In most cases,
if phrasing is appropriate, the pace will be too. So instead of a stopwatch, I think
you can listen as students read aloud for a running record, and record their pauses
(as slash marks where the pauses occur) and instances of expressive reading (by
annotating). You can then go back to evaluate the number of words in a phrase
group, where the pauses were and whether they were syntactically appropriate,
and how often the reader paid attention to punctuation. See the sample record of
oral reading in Figure 4.A. For more information about taking fluency records, see
either The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook or Independent Reading Assessment series
(Serravallo).
Teaching Fluency
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Figure 4.A A record of one student’s reading fluency. Pauses are
indicated by slashes (/) and notations about expression are in the margins.
According to this, I would say the student could work on lengthening her
phrases and being more consistent about attending to ending punctuation to
inform intonation and expression.
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Strategies for Reading with Fluency at a Glance
Strategy
Levels
Genres/
Text Types
Skills
4.1 Read It Like You’ve Always Known It
Any
Any
Automaticity
4.2 Think, “Have I Seen It on the Word Wall?”
Any (although
words would
change based
on level)
Any
Automaticity
4.3 Use a “This Is Interesting” Voice
D and above
Nonfiction
Intonation, expression
4.4 Make the Bumpy Smooth
D–J
Any
Phrasing
4.5 Say Good-Bye to Robot Reading
D and above
Any
Phrasing
4.6 Punctuation at the End of a Sentence
D and above
Any
Intonation, expression
4.7 Warm-Up and Transfer
D and above
Any
Phrasing and/or intonation
4.8 Punctuation Inside a Sentence
E and above
Any
Phrasing
4.9 Partners Help to Smooth It Out
E–J
Any
Phrasing
4.10 Inside Quotes and Outside Quotes
E and above
Fiction
Intonation, expression
4.11 Make Your Voice Match the Feeling
E and above
Fiction
Intonation, expression
4.12 Phonics Phone for Fluency Feedback
E and above
Any
Phrasing
4.13 Make Your Voice Match the Meaning
E and above
Any
Phrasing, intonation
4.14 Get Your Eyes Ahead of the Words
E and above
Any
Phrasing
4.15 Warm-Up Phrases
F and above
Any
Phrasing
4.16 Read Like a Storyteller
F and above
Narrative
Intonation, expression
4.17 Push Your Eyes
J/K (or any
book where
the sentences
are broken up
across lines)
Fiction (mostly
early chapter
books)
Phrasing
4.18 Partners Can Be Fluency Teachers
J and above
Any
Phrasing, intonation, partnership
4.19 Snap to the Next Line
J and above
Any
Phrasing
4.20 Make the Pause Match the Meaning
M and above
Any
Phrasing
4.21 Read It How the Author Tells You (Tags)
M and above
Fiction
Intonation, expression
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4.13 Make Your Voice Match the Meaning
Who is this for?
Levels
E and above
Genre / Text Type
any
skill
Decoding, using
Structure as a Source
skill
of Information
phrasing, intonation
Strategy It’s important that when you’re practicing reading smoothly, you are
focused on what’s happening, what you’re learning about, or the meaning the author
is trying to get across. Depending on the type of text, and the topic, you may change
your voice. Have a voice in your head saying, “What’s this about?” and make sure
your reading matches the meaning.
Teaching Tip The lesson that follows is an example of noticing character emotions
to match intonation and expression. This lesson can also be modified to work with
other genres. For example, the way it sounds when a person reads nonfiction might
be to read it in a, “Whoa! I never knew that!” kind of voice. You could teach a lesson
where you show examples of you reading a persuasive piece and a narrative piece
and discuss together how your intonation sounds different based on the genre. You
will notice that some of the Prompts may work better for narratives, while others will
work best for informational texts.
Lesson Language Remember the other day when we were reading this big book,
The Little Red Hen (Parkes and Smith 1989), together? We were all reading the page
that said, “Then I’ll plant it myself, said the Little Red Hen.” At first we read it sort
of ho-hum. Like, no big deal, I’ll just go ahead and plant it. Then we realized—wait.
She probably wouldn’t be calm about it. She’s probably getting really annoyed! All of
these people turn her down when she asks for help. Then we went back to read it in an
annoyed, frustrated—grrrrrr!—kind of tone.
And then instead of reading it like this (Read
in a calm voice.), we read it like this (Read in
annoyed voice.). That change in how we read it
really matched the meaning. That’s what I want
you to be thinking about when you’re reading
your books. Make sure that the way you read it
really matches what’s happening.
Prompts
•What’s happening now?
•What kind of text is this?
Show me how you’d read that.
•Does your voice match that?
•Did how you read that make sense
with the story?
•Think about what’s happening in the story.
•I could tell you were thinking about the
kind of text this was.
•I can tell you were thinking about how
the character felt here.
•The way you read it matched the story!
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Top text excerpt from Horrible Harry in Room
2B (Kline 1997). Bottom text excerpt from
Playing with Poems (White 2008).
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