Education Endowment Foundation:Fluency: a bridge to reading success

‘Reading fluency’ is a popular focus for lots of schools right now, but what is it? Why might it be effective? And what new research is emerging about it in English classrooms?

Reading fluency is commonly described as a bridge between word recognition (reading words that connects letters to sounds), and comprehension and understanding what we read. As teachers and leaders are increasingly aware, fluency is more than just reading quickly: it is about making reading meaningful.

When pupils read fluently, their cognitiveRelated to the mental process involved in knowing, understanding, and learning. resources shift from the mechanics of decoding to understanding the text. This shift is crucial because without fluency, comprehension is hindered and a pupil who struggles to decode is unlikely to grasp the bigger picture.

Happily, new research from the EEF is seeking to build a rich evidence picture about how reading fluency can be developed in classrooms.

What is ​‘Fluency Focus’ and how can it support teachers?

We’ve just published the findings from a pilot of ​‘Fluency Focus’, a whole-class programme which aims to support oral reading fluency as an important component of reading comprehension — the ultimate goal of reading.

Charles Dickens Research School developed the programme to bring together seven evidence-informed reading fluency strategies in a scheme of work to support explicit teaching and practice of reading fluency in Year 5:

1. Identifying unfamiliar vocabulary (video exemplification of this strategy can be seen in this​‘Clip from the Classroom.’)

2. Modelled fluent reading

3. Text marking and phrased reading 

4. Echo reading

5. Paired repeated reading

6. Reading for performance 

7. Comprehension questions 

The strategies are introduced over the course of the first seven lessons through modelling and explicit teaching, after which pupils practice applying the strategies across a range of texts.

Each lesson plan includes a stimulus text, with the 20-week course offering a diverse range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Teachers receive initial training at an in-person training day, along with three webinars, two coaching sessions and resources to deliver a carefully sequenced programme of weekly one-hour lessons in place of existing reading lessons. Teachers are supported throughout by coaching conversations, a dedicated programme website, and a Fluency Focus champion selected from their school’s senior leadership team. 

Fluency Focus is one of the first projects that we supported through our funding to develop new programmes. Through this work, we support the design and development of approaches that are of high-importance to schools, and where there is currently a lack of available programmes.

The positive findings from the pilot evaluation now give us evidence of the feasibility and acceptability of the programme to schools. We’ll now explore the impact of the programme through a randomised controlled trial, helping to build the evidence of how to support reading fluency and comprehension.