5 surefire strategies for developing fluency

In her article, found on the University of Phoenix website, Lisa Blau shares, what she terms, five

surefire strategies for developing fluency. They are:

1. model fluent reading


2. repeated readings in class


3. promote phrased reading


4. enlist tutors to help ou


5. reader's theatre

As a result of reading the literature and attending the Reading courses with Dr. Conrad, I readily identified with all except one which is 'promote phrased reading'. I don't think that I ever really thought about emphasizing the phrases. Of course it makes sense because we don't read individual words in a choppy, truncated manner. I can see the sense of highlighting phrases for the students and having them repeatedly say them smoothly so that when they are reading the passages, they would transfer that ability and it would go a long way to improve their fluency. For some students who may require more scaffolding, we can even use a marker, pencil etc. to divide, where appropriate, the passages into natural phrasal units.

In her article, Blau mentions that 40% of all fourth graders (nine-year olds) are disfluent. I wish we had statistics for our local context. In the absence of stats, we all know that the percentage is high among our Secondary School students. Thank God there are several strategies that we can employ to remedy this undesirable condition.