What Really Matters in Fluency: Research-based Practices across the Curriculum

Fluency has risen to the top of today’s instructional agenda and yet it is a process that is still unfamiliar terrain for many teachers. To help teachers acquire a fuller understanding of the complexity of fluency development, literacy researcher and best-selling author Dick Allington offers clear recommendations to guide classroom teachers in fostering development with a few modest changes to their daily reading lessons that will strengthen every student’s fluency development in his book What Really Matters in Fluency. Unlike any other book on the topic of fluency, Dick Allington provides a research-base that supports wide, free voluntary reading as an overlooked component in the development of reading fluency along with implications this has for planning fluency interventions. In addition, Dick provides a comprehensive discussion of the factors that inhibit fluency growth and a number of research-based instructional strategies and routines for turning struggling readers into fluent and achieving readers.  Teachers will be inspired and confident to teach fluency!

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• Provides a complete review of the theoretical foundations of fluency development.
• Details the difference between fluency and simple rapid reading to provide teachers with background knowledge of what fluency is, how it develops, and why it is important.
• Features a complete analysis of today's popular fluency assessments and their limitations and offers a detailed framework for developing techniques for monitoring fluency development.
• Presents teachers with friendly tools for assessing and monitoring fluency development and the instructional conditions that foster it.
• Includes numerous websites that provide teacher-friendly information, strategies, and tools for fluency instruction.

Preface v
The What Really Matters Series vi
chapter 1
What Is Fluency and Why Is It “Hot”? 1
chapter 2
How Is Fluency Normally Developed? 15
chapter 3
Why Do Some Readers Struggle
with Fluency? 33
chapter 4
How Should Fluency Be Assessed? 49
chapter 5
Fostering the Development of Fluent
Readers in Core Reading Lessons 75
chapter 6
Interventions to Foster Fluency Development
in Struggling Readers 91
Afterword 111
Appendix A Reproducibles 113
Appendix B Dolch Sight Word List 123
Book Study Guide for
What Really Matters in Fluency 125
Bibliography 131
Index 137