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!

Take a look inside...

• 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.

Richard L. Allington is past-president of the International Reading Association and of the National Reading Conference. Dick Allington has been studying and writing about fluency since his 1983 "classic" Reading Teacher article, Fluency: The neglected reading goal. He is author of over 100 published papers and reports on reading difficulties and the author of a number of books including What Really Matters for Struggling Readers (Allyn & Bacon)and Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence (Heinemann). He is coauthor of Schools that Work, Classrooms that Work (both Allyn & Bacon), and Reading to L earn: Lessons from Exemplary 4^th Grade Classrooms (The Guildford Press). Dick is a former classroom teacher, reading specialist, and federal programs director.