Chapter 7. Fluency and Comprehension
Nandita Gurjar
“Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again” – Louisa May Alcott in Little Women
Keywords: word recognition, re-reading, predicting, summarizing, self-monitoring, think-aloud, echo reading, choral reading, shared reading, guided reading, read-aloud, partner reading, recorded reading, word walls, readers’ theater
Comprehension: Kindergarten standards
Key details
- With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about the key details in a text.
- With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.
- With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.
Craft and structure
- Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text.
- Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems).
- With prompting and support, name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story.
Integration of knowledge and ideas
- With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts).
- With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories.
Range of reading and text complexity
- Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.
- For other grade-level comprehension standards, see Iowa’s standards here.
Fluency
Kindergarten
- Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.
1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade
- Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
- Read on-level text with purpose and understanding.
- Read on-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings.
- Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary.
A student can be seen reading laboriously, trying to sound out every letter while reading. For the word “he,” the student sounds /h/ and /e/, getting confused about what word that might be. It happens with “laugh,” “night,” “here,” “her,” and “she” as well. The student’s inability to recognize high-frequency words automatically by sight and their lack of pattern recognition leads to a frustrating experience in reading. When the teacher asks comprehension questions about the story, the student does not remember much of what they just read. This demonstrates how a lack of fluency impacts reading comprehension in children. This chapter presents research-based strategies for building fluency and comprehension in children.
Comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, phonics, and phonological awareness form the five components of reading. They work together to support proficient reading, whereby children read with purpose and understanding.
Comprehension is understanding. Understanding the elements of a story helps children to comprehend the story. The following video demonstrates the elements