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FLUENCY TRAINING
Fluent readers read smoothly, grouping words into meaningful phrases with the rhythm and intonation of natural speech. Because they don’t need to focus on the mechanics of reading, they can devote their full attention to the meaning of a story. The benefits of fluency are clear: strong comprehension and the capacity to become fully absorbed in a book.
The Institute’s curriculum develops fluency in young readers in three ways:
- The curriculum is designed to help students establish the regular habit of independent reading. The more a child reads, the more quickly and successfully he will achieve fluency.
- The phonics and long-word decoding curriculum helps students master the skills needed to automatically recognize most words by sight and to rapidly decode unknown words.
- The Institute’s curriculum incorporates explicit fluency instruction that trains students to read words in meaningful phrases, paying attention to punctuation and other textual cues. Students listen to a teacher’s model of fluent reading from a passage at the appropriate level of difficulty, and then practice reading and re-reading the same passage aloud. The goal is for students to replicate the phrasing, rhythm, and intonation of the teacher’s model. The progress students make during fluency training transfers to their independent reading.
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