ABSTRACT
The National Reading Panel has underscored the importance of fluency by naming it one of the important components of early reading, along with comprehension, phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary. Fluency instruction will ideally focus on helping children to read words and phrases quickly and automatically, with appropriate expression. Much correlational evidence suggests that increased reading rate is related to higher levels of comprehension, at least in average and struggling readers. Reading researchers currently studying fluency also consider the following often overlooked features: accuracy of decoding; appropriate use of pitch, juncture, and stress in one's voice; and appropriate text phrasing, or "chunking". Expression, a subset of prosody, is the reader's ability to make the written word sound like "real speech" by using the correct intonation of voice. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
