Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide students with explicit instruction and opportunities to read words, phrases, sentences, stories, and expository text accurately, with enough speed and expression to support reading.
Students must exhibit strong decoding skills that are automatic, so that they can more easily focus their attention on understanding words and text. Fluency is the bridge to comprehension.
Ensure that each student reads connected text every day to support reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. (Graduated skill building K through grade 3) (ESSA Tier 2 Moderate)
Source: What Works Clearinghouse, Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade Practice Guide
Effective Practices
- Provide students opportunities to read the same passage through repeated readings.
- Model reading fluency through reading aloud using a range of different texts.
- Practice reading the same text aloud chorally with the student.
- Provide students opportunities to read a text as a whole group together in a choral reading experience.
- Listen to students read orally and time those readings periodically to determine students’ reading rate and accuracy.
- Provide opportunities for oral reading practice with feedback to develop fluent and accurate reading with expression.
- Teach students to self-monitor their understanding of the text and to self-correct word-reading errors.
- Provide opportunities for practice using other techniques such as partner reading and readers’ theater.
- Set goals with students to increase fluency rate and accuracy.
- Kindergarten
-
- Model fluent reading during read alouds and expose students to texts that have many unfamiliar words,as well as complex syntactic structure
- Read accurately and with appropriate speed and expression
- Model how to use simple punctuations, commas, and periods, as cues when to pause or stop
- Read expressively:
- Talk the way the story’s characters would talk
- Make sound effects and funny faces
- Vary the pitch of your voice
- Provide student opportunities to demonstrate fluency related to alphabet knowledge.
- Provide students with opportunities to read simple books and texts accurately with enough speed and expression to support comprehension.
- Model fluent reading during read alouds and expose students to texts that have many unfamiliar words,as well as complex syntactic structure
- Grade 1
-
- Use whole-class read alouds as an opportunity to model fluent reading of complex texts that students can’t read independently.
- Read accurately and with appropriate speed and expression
- Model how to use commas, periods, question marks, and other punctuation as cues when to pause, stop, and/or shift tone.
- Read expressively:
- Talk the way the story’s characters would talk
- Make sound effects and funny faces
- Vary the pitch of your voice throughout the story to make it more interesting.
- Expressively read when you notice words like “screamed”, “cried”, or “laughed”..
- Encourage students to reread favorite books and texts.
- Choose texts for individual students based on the students’ reading levels.
- Teach fluency using a variety of teacher-led instructional practices:
- Repeated reading- Students read aloud a portion of text. The teacher gives feedback, and the student tries it again. This repetition continues three times or until the student can read it with 99% accuracy and with expression that suggests successful comprehension
- Reader’s theater- A collaborative strategy for developing oral reading fluency through performing by reading aloud parts of a script.
- Script selection- Teachers or students can choose the scripts. Scripts are created from grade-level texts or books
- Character assignments-Assign each student a character from the script
- Rehearsal- Students practice multiple times reading their lines with expression
- Performance- The students perform the script as a reader’s theater production
- Choral reading- Reading aloud in unison with a group of students or with the whole class
- Choose a text that is at the appropriate reading level and works well with reading aloud with a group.
- Provide each student with a copy of the text
- Teacher reads aloud and models fluent reading.
- The teacher rereads the text and all students read the passage aloud in unison.
- Students should be following along with the text as they read using a marker or their fingerEcho reading- Explicitly model how to read with accuracy, rate, and prosody.
- Read aloud a text sentence by sentence modeling appropriate fluency.
- Read a sentence, the students echo back the sentence using the same rate and prosody as the teacher.
- Can be done with a whole group or small groups of students as well as individual students
- Monitor student progress on oral reading fluency (ORF) to identify student fluency rates and match students with appropriate books and texts to support fluency rates.
- Students scoring 10 or more words below the 50th percentile need a fluency-building program (if word accuracy is 95% or above).
- 50th Percentile:
- Winter = 29 WCPM (word count per minute)
- Spring = 60 WCPM
- Use the average score of two unpracticed readings from grade-level materials.
- 50th Percentile:
- Students scoring 10 or more words below the 50th percentile need a fluency-building program (if word accuracy is 95% or above).
- Use whole-class read alouds as an opportunity to model fluent reading of complex texts that students can’t read independently.
- Grade 2
-
- Model fluent reading during read alouds by reading and choosing texts that are more complex and that are above students’ reading levels.
- Read accurately and with appropriate speed and expression
- Model how to use commas, periods, question marks, and other punctuation as cues when to pause, stop, and/or shift tone
- Read expressively;
- Talk the way the story’s characters would talk
- Make sound effects and funny faces
- Vary the pitch of your voice throughout the story to make it more interesting.
- Expressively read when you notice the punctuation such as ! and ?.
- Utilize technology so students can listen to others read fluently.
- Teach fluency using a variety of teacher-led instructional practices:
- Repeated reading- Students read aloud a portion of text. The teacher gives feedback, and the student tries it again. This repetition continues three times or until the student can read it with 99% accuracy and with expression that suggests successful comprehension
- Reader’s theater- A collaborative strategy for developing oral reading fluency through performing by reading aloud parts of a script.
- Script selection- Teachers or students can choose the scripts. Scripts are created from grade-level texts or books
- Character assignments-Assign each student a character from the script
- Rehearsal- Students practice multiple times reading their lines with expression
- Performance- The students perform the script as a reader’s theater production
- Choral reading- Reading aloud in unison with a group of students or with the whole class
- Choose a text that is at the appropriate reading level and works well with reading aloud with a group.
- Provide each student with a copy of the text
- Teacher reads aloud and models fluent reading.
- The teacher rereads the text and all students read the passage aloud in unison.
- Students should be following along with the text as they read using a marker or their fingerThe text should be at appropriate reading level
- Echo reading- Explicitly model how to read with accuracy, rate, and prosody.
- Read aloud a text sentence by sentence modeling appropriate fluency.
- Monitor student progress on oral reading fluency (ORF) to identify student fluency rates and match students with appropriate books and texts to support fluency rates.
- Students scoring 10 or more words below the 50th percentile need a fluency-building program (if word accuracy is 95% or above).
- 50th Percentile:
- Fall = 50 WCPM (word count per minute)
- Winter = 84 WCPM
- Spring = 100 WCPM
- Use the average score of two unpracticed readings from grade-level materials.
- 50th Percentile:
- Students scoring 10 or more words below the 50th percentile need a fluency-building program (if word accuracy is 95% or above).
- Model fluent reading during read alouds by reading and choosing texts that are more complex and that are above students’ reading levels.
- Grade 3
-
- Model fluent reading during read alouds.
- Use text for individual students based on the students’ reading levels.
- Teach fluency using a variety of teacher-led instructional practices:
- Repeated reading- Students read aloud a portion of text. The teacher gives feedback, and the student tries it again. This repetition continues three times or until the student can read it with 99% accuracy and with expression that suggests successful comprehension
- Reader’s theater- A collaborative strategy for developing oral reading fluency through performing by reading aloud parts of a script.
- Script selection- Teachers or students can choose the scripts. Scripts are created from grade-level texts or books
- Character assignments-Assign each student a character from the script
- Rehearsal- Students practice multiple times reading their lines with expression
- Performance- The students perform the script as a reader’s theater production
- Choral reading- Reading aloud in unison with a group of students or with the whole class
- Choose a text that is at the appropriate reading level and works well with reading aloud with a group.
- Provide each student with a copy of the text
- Teacher reads aloud and models fluent reading.
- The teacher rereads the text and all students read the passage aloud in unison.
- Students should be following along with the text as they read using a marker or their fingerThe text should be at appropriate reading level
- Echo reading- Explicitly model how to read with accuracy, rate, and prosody.
- Read aloud a text sentence by sentence modeling appropriate fluency.
- Monitor student progress on oral reading fluency (ORF) to identify student fluency rates and match students with appropriate books and texts to support fluency rates.
- Students scoring 10 or more words below the 50th percentile need a fluency-building program (if word accuracy is 95% or above).
- 50th Percentile:
- Fall = 83 WCPM (word count per minute)
- Winter = 97 WCPM
- Spring = 112 WCPM
- Use the average score of two unpracticed readings from grade-level materials.
- 50th Percentile:
- Students scoring 10 or more words below the 50th percentile need a fluency-building program (if word accuracy is 95% or above).
Tools and Activities
Reading Text with Appropriate Phrasing and Proper Expression
Sample instructional routine for second grade oral reading fluency.
Download from Florida Center for Reading Research
Reading Fluency Lesson
Instructional plan for students to independently read instructional text using national norms for rate and accuracy with demonstrating comprehension of the text.
Download from Tennessee Center for the Study and Treatment of Dyslexia
Fluency Development Lesson
A systematic, explicit instructional plan that can be implemented in 15-20 minutes and includes effective reading practices like echo, choral, and repeated reading.
Learn More from Renaissance
Foundational Skills Activities
Find several example activities for teaching foundational skills to support reading for understanding, including blending, chunking, sounding out, word analysis, and more.
Learn More from What Works Clearinghouse
Word Reading Strategies
Prompts to remind students, when encountering words they find difficult to read, to apply decoding and word-recognition skills and strategies and reread words in context.
Learn More from What Works Clearinghouse
Choral Reading Lesson
Experts and teachers explain and demonstrate how to effectively implement choral reading.
Learn More from Reading Rockets
Echo Reading Activity
Watch a third grade small group engaging in an echo reading activity.
Learn More from the Institute of Education Sciences
Don’t Read Like a Robot
Watch a fun music video about reading with expression.
Learn More from GoNoodle
Models of Fluent Readers from GreatSchools:
Kindergarten
1st Grade
2nd Grade
3rd Grade
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.