When we talk about improving reading in schools, most of the focus has tended to fall on two key skills: word decoding and reading comprehension.

However, there is another skill that acts as the bridge between decoding and comprehension: reading fluency.

It’s a skill that’s starting to get more attention. The Department for Education’s English Hubs will be rolling out reading fluency CPD training sessions to schools from this month.

Meanwhile, recent research by FFT Education Datalab has found that measuring pupils’ reading fluency at primary school can help to tackle the disadvantage gap and narrow the gender divide for reading at key stage 2.

What is reading fluency?

Being able to decode words is not the same as making meaning from them and, for many children, there is a gap between reading words and comprehension. Reading-fluency instruction can help to close that gap.

Reading a certain number of words per minute is often taken as a measure of fluency, but there is a lot more to it. At its heart, there are three components to be mastered:

• Accuracy: reading an appropriately pitched text with few or no mispronunciations, word substitutions or omissions.
• Automaticity: reading words instantaneously, on sight, without overtly sounding out and blending.
• Prosody: reading with expression, fluidity, phrasing and musicality.

Far from being just a “performative” skill, being able to read fluently actually helps to support children’s understanding of what they read. As the Education Endowment Foundation explains, “Fluent readers demonstrate automaticity in recognising words, allowing them to focus on comprehension and deeper understanding of the content.”

Ultimately, teaching reading fluency has the power to transform children from simply being able to read words into accomplished readers who understand and comprehend text and, most importantly, enjoy reading.

But what does good reading-fluency instruction look like?

Research suggests that expert, overt instruction is often required. That doesn’t mean that teachers need to add dedicated reading-fluency lessons to the timetable. Little and often is sufficient for most children, either as part of whole-class practice or in one-to-one or small group interventions.

It’s important to remember that, because reading fluency relies on children becoming accomplished across all three fluency components (accuracy, automaticity and prosody), a mix of strategies is required.

Here are five approaches you can try:

1. Echo reading

Echo reading allows teachers to model prosody by reading a line of text aloud, and asking pupils to read the text back to them using the same speed, intonation and expression. This builds the link between words in text and the spoken word.

Echo reading requires supervision as you will need to monitor the pupil’s “echo” to ensure they are correctly mimicking the modelled prosody.

This approach is best suited to one-to-one or small-group work, rather than whole-class work, and is most effective when paired with close tracking of the text - otherwise a child might echo back the words from memory, rather than reading.

Echo reading should be used little and often, to help tackle challenging texts. A good tip is to select a new text just above the current reading ability of your group that they would struggle to read independently.

2. Repeated reading

This is one of the highest-value fluency strategies you can use. It’s relatively easy to implement as it simply involves asking children to read a text they have already encountered in class.

Having the opportunity to read a text again and again allows them to rehearse and refine their reading, as they become familiar with new words, text structures and different topics to improve their comprehension.

You can build opportunities for repeated reading into your weekly curriculum planning by setting rereading tasks as homework. You might also consider performance reading (see below) as an opportunity to reread a text, or explore creative ways of engaging pupils with rereading, such as timed reading challenges.

3. Performance reading

Encouraging children to read aloud with prosody is already a common approach in many primary classrooms. However, to get the most benefit from performance reading, children should be taught how to read the text with expert prosody beforehand, so they are ready to apply their new prosodic awareness with greater independence.

The performance then becomes a chance to read the text in a meaning-laden manner, which, in turn, gives them another opportunity to deepen their understanding of the words on the page.

When using this approach, you can avoid unnecessary pressure or embarrassment by asking children to perform their reading in pairs or small groups.

It’s also worth remembering that performance reading doesn’t have to be limited to chapters of the class reader; it can be used for songs, poetry, speeches, monologues and playscripts, too.

4. Text marking

Text marking involves breaking a text down into phrases or units of meaning, using simple notations to indicate short or long pauses. It’s an effective way to help children see that the way in which they read a text supports their comprehension of it, while drawing attention to the role of punctuation as a phrase marker.

The key to successful text marking is to keep it simple - this isn’t about creating a lengthy crib sheet of marks and their meanings.

A great way in is for teachers to model how they, as expert readers, would mark up a chunk of text to aid their prosodic reading.

Start by teaching text marking at a whole-class level in this way, then use it across the curriculum to help engage children with challenging texts.

You can also invite children to read a text that you have incorrectly text-marked. Can they recognise how the incorrect phrasing distorts the meaning?

5. Modelled expert prosody

Another simple way to teach reading fluency is to model your expertise as a reader whenever you read to your children. Hearing good prosody modelled throughout the day by teachers and other adults (such as teaching assistants) helps children to understand what their internal reading voice should sound like.

Modelling prosody isn’t just about “doing the voices” for different characters; think also about how you will read long sentences, paying attention to punctuation and appropriately threading words together into meaningful phrases.

A good tip is to practise how you will read a text in advance to really bring it to life for the listener. You can also over-emphasise your delivery, so that children notice what you are doing and have a clear model to imitate.

Penny Slater is partnerships lead at HFL Education (formerly Herts for Learning)

You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android