Fluency

There are four components that make up the definition of fluency: accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension.  The three components that I kept thinking about when I was reading this article were accuracy, rate, and comprehension. Reading with accuracy is important because if a child reads the miss reads a word in the sentence, the entire sentence is given a different meaning. This then affects the child's comprehension of what was just read.  While tutoring a girl this summer getting ready to be in third grade, this situation happened a lot to her.  She would try to read really fast because she thought good readers read really fast. She would say the wrong word trying to speed read, which then changed the meaning of the whole sentence.  I had to keep reminding her slow down and take her time.  When I assured her that it was okay to slow down and not rush through reading, she didn't miss-read any of the words.  Once she wasn't rushing anymore she could understand the story much more successfully.