Teaching children to become fluent and automatic readers

Kuhn, M.R. et al. (2006). Teaching children to become fluent and automatic readers. Journal of Literacy Research, 38(4), 357-387.

This article looks closely at the concept of fluency and summarizes some of the key studies of fluency, but it does even more that that. It actually tries to get at the nature of the reading process itself and how the ways we provide reading instruction can make a huge difference in how children become readers. This may be particularly true at critical periods of literacy development, such as that all-important "transitional" phase in grade 2 or 3. I've seen the achievement gap begin to widen at that age, and this study offers some hints as to why.

The crux of the matter is that children need to read connected text a lot more than they do in most classrooms, and these should be engaging but challenging texts. Maybe it's better to have lots of scaffolded practice with difficult but interesting text than to read a lot of too easy text.