The Science of Reading: Fluency Activities for Students

While the science of reading is often used to describe reading programs that focus on phonics instruction, it actually refers to decades of research that have studied how the human brain learns to read. While decoding is a critical component of the science of reading, it is just one of the five pillars of reading instruction, which also include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 

The National Reading Panel explains how each of the science of reading pillars works together to form the foundation of an effective reading program. To read proficiently, students must master:

• Phonemic awareness: The ability to identify different sounds that make up a word.

• Phonics skills: The ability to match sounds to letters or groups of letters.

• Fluency: The ability to read accurately and quickly.

• Vocabulary: The ability to understand the meaning of words.

• Comprehension: The ability to read a text and understand its overall meaning.

Fluency, the third pillar, serves as a bridge between sounding out words and understanding them. Without it, students may struggle to decode and make sense of what they read. This blog post explores what fluency is, how it fits into the science of reading, why it matters, and provides evidence-based strategies to help students strengthen these skills. 

What Is Fluency in the Science of Reading?

Fluent readers can read accurately and smoothly, and understand what they’re reading. While fluency is often mistakenly seen as reading quickly, it actually refers to a reader’s ability to read with accuracy, speed, and proper expression. As students develop these fluency skills, they ultimately strengthen their reading comprehension and become better readers.

Accuracy

Fluent readers can recognize and decode letter patterns and words quickly and correctly. To do this, they must recognize letters (graphemes) have associated sounds (phonemes). Then, they must correctly decode those sounds into words, with the understanding that some irregular words cannot be decoded. 

Speed

Speed isn’t the same as fluency, but it plays an important role. When students can read quickly while also comprehending the meaning of a text, it shows they have developed fluency skills. If a student can read fast but not fully understand what they’re reading, they haven’t yet mastered fluency. While speed matters, fluency is more than racing through text; it’s about processing words efficiently and making meaning of those words.

Expression

Expression is a part of fluency and refers to a student’s ability to read out loud in a way that sounds like spoken language. Expression includes tone, pitch, volume, emphasis, and rhythm. Students who grasp expression know when to pause, which words in a text to emphasize, and how to use emotion when reading aloud.

Why Fluency Is Critical for Comprehension

Fluency gives students the skills to decode words and attach meaning to them, freeing up their cognitive energy to focus on what they are reading. This allows them to apply higher-order thinking skills, known as the theory of automaticity. Once readers have deeply processed the structure and meaning of a word, they can more automatically access the word when reading it, making that word a sight word. As students build decoding skills and develop an awareness of sentence structure, they can increase the speed at which they process text until this processing no longer competes with reading comprehension, but facilitates it. The more automatically students can process a text, the easier it is for them to integrate new information with prior knowledge.

A science of reading approach to instruction helps develop fluency and build reading comprehension. A study of kindergarten and first grade students found explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, automaticity/fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension yielded nearly 20-point gains on standardized assessments compared to peers without explicit fluency instruction.

Taking a science of reading approach to reading instruction benefits older students as well. Students entering middle and high school are expected to have made the leap from learning to read to reading to learn. But some students continue to struggle with vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Programs like Lexia® PowerUp Literacy® can help students bridge these gaps. In one Arkansas district, sixth grade students showed a 16% increase in reading scores on the ACT after district leaders implemented the science of reading program.

Common Barriers to Developing Fluency

Deficits in decoding, vocabulary, and structured fluency instruction can all create barriers to developing fluency. That’s why a science of reading approach to literacy instruction, with its explicit emphasis on each of these pillars, helps students develop the skills they need to become proficient readers.

• Slow decoding and lack of automaticity. When students expend a great deal of effort sounding out each word, they may read more slowly and have little energy left for comprehension. This can make them feel discouraged, cause them to avoid reading practice, and fall further behind their peers. 

• Limited vocabulary or background knowledge. Students who decode accurately may stumble upon words they don’t know or concepts they don’t understand. If they have a limited vocabulary or a lack of background knowledge, it can make text harder to follow, slow their reading rate, and interrupt comprehension. For example, a student might be able to read the word photosynthesis correctly, but fail to understand the meaning of a text if they don’t know what it means or have never studied the scientific process. 

• Lack of structured fluency instruction in classrooms. While phonics and comprehension often receive significant instructional attention, fluency sometimes falls through the cracks. Too frequently, students are expected to “figure it out” through reading practice. However, research shows fluency must be taught directly and explicitly—through guided oral reading, modeling fluent expression, and providing students with opportunities for repeated reading of familiar texts. Without direct instruction, students who lag in fluency may never close the gap, even if their decoding and comprehension skills improve,.

Evidence-Based Fluency Activities for Classrooms

All students can build their fluency skills with practice. Structured, research-backed strategies, such as repeated reading, partner reading, decodable texts, and progress monitoring, can all help struggling readers transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

Repeated Reading and Modeled Fluency

Fluent reading isn’t just about speed—it requires accuracy, expression, and comprehension. Repeated reading and modeled fluency can help students strengthen all of these skills. Repeated reading helps students internalize sight words, and can also help students who decode accurately but lack smoothness and confidence in their own reading. 

Hearing fluent reading gives students a model to follow. When they listen to a teacher, peer, or audio recording of fluent reading, they learn how to phrase their words, adjust tone, and pronounce words correctly. Teachers can model fluent reading by demonstrating pace, phrasing, and expression, giving students a benchmark for their own practice. 

• Begin by reading a short text aloud to the class, emphasizing expression and pacing. Then, have students read the same passage aloud in pairs or individually.

• Read a sentence or paragraph aloud and ask students to “echo” it back, mimicking the tone and phrasing.

• Read a text in unison with students to support them and build confidence.

Partner Reading and Peer Feedback

Paired reading offers students a low-stakes way to practice fluency and provides an opportunity to give and receive immediate feedback. Educators can pair a slightly stronger reader with a peer and ask them to read together, taking turns. Students should provide feedback and encouragement to one another. 

Before splitting students into pairs, teachers should demonstrate what effective partner reading looks like, emphasizing turn-taking, model active listening, and provide constructive feedback. Select short texts appropriate for students’ reading levels so they can focus on accuracy, speed, and expression. Finally, teachers should ask students to set their own reading goals. For example, a student may want to learn to read with better expression or read without rushing through long words.

Using Decodable Texts for Fluency

A strong phonics foundation allows students to develop fluency more easily. Decodable texts that align with specific phonics patterns students already know will enable them to apply and practice new sound-symbol patterns in context. Decodables can help scaffold automaticity and reduce word guessing, supporting both accuracy and reading confidence.

For example, if young readers have just learned short “a” words, such as cat, map, or ran, a decodable text featuring those words can provide them with practice and reinforce the taught skills. Teachers can give students decodable texts that increase in complexity, which can gradually move them toward grade-level reading without significant gaps in decoding or fluency.

• Pair decodable reading with oral fluency practice, such as echo reading or partner reading, to help students improve both accuracy and expression.

• To help students smooth out their reading, encourage repeated reading of decodable texts.

• Use decodable texts alongside progress monitoring solutions to track mastery of phonics patterns and growth in fluency throughout time.

• Point out phonics connections to students, asking them to listen to blends or sound patterns as they read the text.

When educators embed decodables into fluency instruction, they can connect fluency practice to phonics instruction, rather than have students rely on memorization or guessing. This makes fluency practice more effective and equitable for all students, including multilinguals or those with learning differences, such as dyslexia.

Timed Readings and Progress Monitoring

By incorporating timed reading into fluency instruction, educators can get clear data about a student’s fluency, including their reading accuracy and rate. This information can provide quantitative data about whether a student is developing automaticity and where they may require additional support. While timed readings can provide insights, they might also cause students anxiety. By framing them as “personal best” opportunities to achieve personal goals, teachers can help students view them as a chance to show growth. 

Here are some tips to consider as educators incorporate timed readings and progress monitoring into instruction:

• Select familiar texts students have practiced previously to focus on fluency rather than decoding new words.

• Use visuals, goal sheets, or simple charts to help students see their progress throughout time.

• Celebrate effort, not just speed. Educators should let students know about their improvements in expression, accuracy, and confidence.

• Limit progress monitoring to once a week or every other week.

• Offer private feedback to students to avoid peer comparison.

How Lexia Supports Science of Reading Fluency Development

Lexia® provides science of reading-based solutions that address fluency as part of comprehensive literacy instruction. By embedding fluency instruction within daily practice—rather than isolating it—Lexia solutions ensure students in grades K–12 develop decoding accuracy and a smooth, expressive reading style that supports comprehension.

Lexia Core5 Reading

Lexia® Core5® Reading  is an Adaptive Blended Learning program that accelerates literacy skills for elementary school students of all abilities, helping them make the critical shift from learning to read to reading to learn. Core5 includes 21 levels, each covering all six core components of reading. Each level consists of five activities divided into six, producing 20 different units. 

Core5 addresses automaticity and fluency in grades pre-K–5 through targeted activities that enhance students’ processing speed. The program exposes all students—including multilinguals and students with dyslexia and other learning differences—to the fundamental areas of reading, from phonological awareness to fluency to comprehension. The program’s scope and sequence builds students’ foundational and advanced literacy skills and includes activities that address automaticity and fluency.

In Core5, fluency instruction focuses on essential aspects of sentence structure and activities that involve analyzing intonation, emphasis, phrasing, rhythm, and rhyme scheme. These activities address critical elements of fluency related to prosody. 

• Fluency activities include informational and narrative texts with opportunities for shared and repeated reading. Specifically, in the passage fluency activities, students engage in shared reading with synchronized highlighting of the text. Then, they fill in missing words in passages. This format promotes monitoring for meaning while reading. Teachers can measure and report accuracy and words per minute. 

• Other activities include work at the paragraph level, involving the timed silent reading of narrative and expository texts that follow a maze format. These silent reading activities are designed to enhance processing speed while emphasizing meaning.

• Lexia Skill Builders® and Lexia Lessons® also serve as key fluency resources, supporting the development of additional skills essential for reading fluency, including oral reading with a focus on expression and appropriate prosody.

Multiple peer-reviewed and district-level case studies have shown Core5 accelerates reading gains across grade levels and demographic groups. 

• Students using Core5 with fidelity are more likely to close reading gaps and meet or exceed grade-level benchmarks.

• District leaders report statistically significant growth in literacy skills, often in less time than traditional methods.

• Real-time performance data empowers educators to make informed, responsive instructional decisions.

Lexia PowerUp Literacy

For various reasons, many adolescent students lack critical literacy skills, including fluency, which puts them at a disadvantage in reading and writing. Lexia PowerUp Literacy provides students in grades 6–12 with individualized, scaffolded instruction based on real-time student performance data, helping them achieve multiple years of growth in a single academic year. PowerUp addresses literacy skills in three strands: Word Study, Grammar, and Comprehension. Fluency is one of the subskills addressed in the Word Study strand.

PowerUp begins with building automaticity for sound-symbol correspondences at the word level and progresses to connected text fluency practice. Automaticity activities focus on increasing students’ sight word vocabulary, with a particular emphasis on regularly and irregularly spelled high-frequency words. The solution promotes text-level fluency by giving students extensive opportunities to practice reading informational and narrative texts. 

• Students get repeated practice with phonics patterns, syllable types, prefixes, and roots. Throughout time, word recognition becomes automatic, freeing students to focus on comprehension.

• Short, timed word lists (for example, “Read 50 words in 30 seconds”) provide students with an opportunity to measure their growth. Educators should encourage accuracy first, then track progress in words correct per minute (WCPM).

• Students then transfer pattern recognition into multisyllabic words and short passages. Reading aloud with phrasing and expression helps them build confidence and prosody.

• PowerUp includes paper-based activities to support repeated readings, reinforce word lists, and facilitate partner practice. Lexia Skill Builders can be used in small groups, as homework, or to maintain consistent fluency practice.

With effect sizes of up to 0.69, research shows PowerUp delivers up to five times the impact of typical interventions, even for multilinguals, proving its effectiveness across diverse classrooms.

Fluency is much more than speedy reading. It requires students to read with accuracy, automaticity, expression, and comprehension. By addressing common barriers and employing structured strategies such as repeated reading, decodable texts, and peer feedback, teachers can equip students with the tools they need to become fluent and proficient readers.

Discover how Lexia can help support fluency development in the classroom with research-backed literacy solutions.

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2.  National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf
3. National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf
4. Rasinski, T. V., Reutzel, D. R., Chard, D., & Linan-Thompson, S. (2011). Reading fluency. In M. L. Kamil, P. D. Pearson, E. B. Moje, & P. P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. IV, pp. 286–319). Routledge.
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