According to Jan Hasbrouck, “[f]luency is not a skill” but rather the “outcome […] of skillful reading” (Loftus & Sappington, 2024). Thus, even though we sometimes work on fluency in and of itself, it is important to complete diagnostic assessments to determine if there are underlying skill deficits that are impacting fluency and to provide instruction in any deficient areas (Loftus & Sappington, 2024). However, building those foundational skills alone is often not enough for struggling readers to achieve fluent reading, and this is where fluency-targeted interventions are warranted. Fluency is measured through assessments of accuracy, rate, and prosody, and to help students improve their reading fluency, Jan Hasbrouck suggests working on fluency at all levels of complexity: word-level, phrase-level, and passage-level (Loftus & Sappington, 2024). Specific instructional strategies at the word-level and phrase or sentence-level are listed below:

Word-Level Interventions

Use Rapid Word Recognition Charts

A “rapid word recognition chart” or “rapid word chart,” also sometimes called a rapid automatized naming (RAN) chart, is a “matrix” in which a small set of words are listed in rows and each word repeats a few times throughout the page (Mather & Wendling, 2024, pp. 162-163). To practice rapidly recognizing words, students are “timed for one minute while reading the squares aloud” (p. 162). Students can also practice reading the words in the chart multiple times to increase their speed. An example chart for four target words is included on p. 10 of this resource from Crafting Minds. Mather and Wendling (2024) also reference a free resource from Neuhaus Education Center that allows for the entry of six words and will then generate several associated RAN charts. 

Teach Rime Patterns 

A rime pattern is the vowel and subsequent consonants in a word. For example, the rime in the word “stop” is /ŏp/. The consonants preceding the rime are called the onset. Words that contain the same rime pattern will rhyme (e.g., “stop,” “top,” and “shop”), and these rhyming words together are sometimes designated as part of a word family. According to Orkin et al. (2022), “teaching students to divide words into onset letter(s) and rime patterns and to blend the two using various metacognitive strategies (Lovett et al., 2017)” is one way to “build[ ] automaticity in single word reading” (p. 7). This works as a “visual chunking” strategy that “support[s] automatic and efficient, or fluent, reading” (p. 7). 

Teach Morphology

Providing instruction in morphology means teaching about the meaningful parts of words (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, roots, base words). Similar to rime patterns, teaching students about word parts like prefixes and suffixes supports word-level automaticity because it “helps [a] child chunk common orthographic patterns” (Orkin et al., 2022, p. 8). 

Identify and Teach Words With Multiple Meanings

Multiple meaning words are words with two or more possible meanings. For example, depending on the context, the word table can mean a piece of furniture (e.g., The family gathered around the kitchen table), a visual for organizing information (e.g., Please send me the census data organized into a table), or the action of setting something aside for later (e.g., The committee will table the budget discussions until further notice). Identifying words with multiple meanings and teaching students how to use them will support reading fluency because, as Orkin et al. (2022) write, “[t]he more students know about a word (e.g., the multiple meanings of a word), the greater their automaticity when retrieving its meanings and roles in text” (p. 5).

Phrase and Sentence-Level Interventions

Chunk Phrases

One way to support fluency at the phrase or sentence level is to teach students about the ways words are grouped together into meaningful phrases. This may involve explicitly teaching students about different types of phrases (e.g., prepositional phrases like in the water; subject phrases like the productive team members, or predicate phrases ran quickly and quietly) and other grammatical constructions, and then showing students how to apply this knowledge to break down sentences into syntactic “chunks.” Melissa Orkin calls this giving students “an opportunity to scoop sentences” (Loftus & Sappington, 2024b). Students can practice reading isolated phrases individually, as in Rasinski’s Fry Instant Phrases. Students can also use “Sail reading” as a way to break down sentences part by part for practice. Identifying punctuation can go hand in hand with this phrase chunking work and can also support students in using accurate prosody (e.g., rising intonation for questions when a “?” is identified).

Teach Parts of Speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)

Orkin et al. (2022) recommend teaching students about parts of speech because this “both supports the automatic retrieval of words as students read sentences and correlates strongly with their reading fluency and comprehension (Mokhtari & Thompson, 2006)” (p. 8). 

For more information about phrase and sentence-level fluency practice, check out this blog post: Building Contextual Reading Fluency Through Phrase-Level Practice.

Finally, Melissa Orkin, Maryanne Wolf, and colleagues emphasize the importance of pulling all of these levels of fluency together into a “multi-component approach,” which they call POSSuM (Orkin et al., 2022; Loftus & Sappington, 2024). POSSuM stands for “five aspects of word knowledge”: phonology (sounds), orthography (letters), semantics (meaning), syntax (sentence structure), and morphology (word parts) (p. 5). Orkin et al. (2022) discuss the importance of using “instructional activities that concurrently build students’ automaticity with the five aspects of word knowledge, while providing daily practice connecting all five of these components, and applying them to connected text” (p. 6). More information about this multi-faceted approach can be found in the article “The More You Know: How Teaching Multiple Aspects of Word Knowledge Builds Fluency Skills” and on the Melissa & Lori Love Literacy podcast. 

References

Loftus, M. & Sappington, L. (Hosts). (2024, May 10). Science of Reading beyond phonics: Fluency instruction and assessment with Jan Hasbrouck (No. 153) [Audio podcast episode]. In Melissa & Lori Love Literacy. Great Minds. https://literacypodcast.com/podcast?podcast=Buzzsprout-15157927

Loftus, M. & Sappington, L. (Hosts). (2024b, December 5). Building Fluency with POSSUM with Melissa Orkin and Maryanne Wolf  (No. 211) [Audio podcast episode]. In Melissa & Lori Love Literacy. Great Minds. https://literacypodcast.com/podcast?podcast=Buzzsprout-15743362

Mather, M. & Wendling, B.J. (2024). Essentials of dyslexia assessment and intervention (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Orkin, M., Vanacore, K., Rhinehart, L., Gotlieb, R., & Wolf, M. (2022 May). The more you know: How teaching multiple aspects of word knowledge builds fluency skills. The Reading League Journal, 3(2), 4-13. https://nj.dyslexiaida.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/10/Gillis-NJ-IDA-Fluency-Handouts.pdf