According to the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, “Fluent readers are able to read orally with speed, accuracy, and proper expression.” But what does that look like and sound like? According to a May 2015 article in Education Week, Reading Fluency Viewed as Neglected Skill By Liana Heitin, a "2002 special study on oral reading by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 40 percent of students in a nationally representative sample of 4th graders lacked proper expression and adherence to syntax in their reading. About 25 percent of students read with less than 95 percent accuracy, and 35 percent read fewer than 104 words per minute, which most experts would consider too slow for 4th grade."
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Literacy experts are insistent that fluency can and should be explicitly taught. But according to a 2008 study of Reading First, most teachers spend less than four minutes a day on fluency instruction. Timothy V. Rasinski, a literacy education professor at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio,and an expert in the area of fluency, wrote in The Reading Teacher, the International Literacy Association's journal, that fluency had become "a pariah in the reading field."
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- ALCCRS Reading Foundational Skills - Fluency RF 1.23, 2.21 - 5.21: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.