DEVELOPING READING FLUENCY TO IMPROVE
READING PERFORMANCE
Tami Lee
Building reading fluency is an essential component of effective reading instruction. As Young and
Rasinski (2009) stated, “With the report of the National Reading Panel, reading fluency has once again, after a
long absence, become a critical goal in the elementary reading curriculum” (p. 4). When students read with
fluency—a quick and effortless reading of text—their working memory is free to concentrate on
comprehending the text. “Automaticity theorists (e.g., LaBerge & Samuels, 1974) contend that effortless
decoding of text allows readers to focus on the meaning of the text and hence aids in comprehension” (MustiRao, Hawkins, & Barkley, 2009, p. 13).
Although reading fluency has been identified as vital to the development of reading, the reading
curriculum utilized in elementary classrooms often fails to include the component of reading fluency in the
instruction of reading. According to Rasinski, Padak, Linek, and Sturtevant (1994), “Classroom observations
confirm that fluency is not an issue dealt with in most classroom reading instruction” (p. 159). They also stress
that based on the knowledge of the importance of reading fluency to the literacy development for children,