Children who struggle with reading fluency

Children who struggle with reading fluency
Table of Contents
1. Introduction    3
2. Importance of Reading Fluency and Identification of a Child with Fluency Struggles    3
3. Strategies to Improve Reading Fluency    4
4. A Suitable Intervention Strategy to Improve Reading Fluency of Felicia    5
5. Conclusion    6
6. References    7
1. Introduction
There are children encountered many times, who read either too slow in a robotic tone or too fast like a jet. Both the ways, it is hard to grasp the actual meaning of what they speak. On the contrary, it is easy to understand when children read aloud with fluency. It will be a delight to hear to speakers who read with fluency, emphasizing certain words and adding expression to what they read. Hudson, Pullen and Lane define fluency as ‘the ability of an individual to read connected text or passage accurately at a conversational speed along with proper expression or prosody.’ In short, reading fluency is the capability of an individual to read aloud with a meaningful expression, smoothly, accurately and swiftly.
2. Importance of Reading Fluency and Identification of a Child with Fluency Struggles
When children read with fluency, they tap their metacognitive strategies, which as a result can question, visualize, and interpret. It significantly suggests the reading comprehension of an individual. The two essential components of fluency are rate and accuracy. The total number of words per minute determine rate while the right identification of words determine accuracy (Samuels, 2018). Those, who read with fluency will be able to break the text into meaningful parts and can mark boundaries for sentences and phrases. In addition, they change the pitch and emphasize important words. Readers reading with fluency can make the text sound like a regular conversation. Fluency has been recognized as a critical aspect of reading and is considered as one of the important building blocks of reading as it is directly associated with comprehension.
Greater fluency can build confidence in a reader and helps them to enjoy reading further. Decoding of words is possible when children can identify words effortlessly or automatically. The concept of automaticity is the capability of a reader to identify words faster with minimal attention required to the appearance of words. As mentioned by Cecil (2017), the key to skilled reading is the ability to read the words by sight spontaneously. In children who have good pronunciation skills; however, lack the speed in reading, the process of decoding is not fluent or automatic and this can affect their performance.
They can take more time to read than their peers and also have limited time to comprehend, remember, and review as they take time to read. Children with less fluency will also have to spend excess cognitive energy when compared to their peers in identifying individual words. Besides, they might struggle to retain the text in their memory and hence fail to integrate the same with other passages or text. Issues with reading fluency are commonly seen in children with learning disabilities. A child who is capable of reading quickly; nevertheless, cannot decode or substitute words is considered to be non-fluent. Lack of reading fluency can lead to losing comprehension, poor reading experience, and thus lack of motivation to read more. Moreover, poor reading fluency may affect the academic performance of an individual. The two most common patterns of reading difficulties in children are that the child faces difficulty in reading and decoding words accurately.
Alongside, the child reads in slowly and laboriously and the child shows a decently accurate word reading or decoding with good control over phonics and phonemic awareness; however, reads very slowly. These deficits in fluency in children with reading disabilities can be associated...