Every secondary school teacher has come across pupils who struggle to read aloud in class. 

For a fifteen-year-old, not being able to read out loud in front of your peers can be excruciatingly embarrassing - not to mention a barrier to accessing parts of the curriculum.

Put simply, reading fluency describes the ability to read aloud with appropriate accuracy, pace, stress and intonation. It’s an important skill, yet not one that we tend to focus on in secondary school. 

It is largely considered a skill to be taught at primary level, the assumption being that most secondary pupils can read aloud with sufficient competency, so teachers of this stage needn’t consider it.

But is this assumption correct? Prominent literacy researchers, including Professor Tim Rasinski, have argued that too many students continue to struggle as dysfluent readers far into their secondary education.

In a new study, Oral Reading Fluency of College Graduates: Toward a Deeper Understanding of College Ready Fluency, Rasinski and colleagues explore the part that reading fluency plays in making US students “college ready”. 

The team assessed the reading fluency of 113 university graduates by recording their word recognition accuracy and automaticity while reading four high-level texts of varying difficulty.

They determined that graduates who read within the “normal and appropriate range of performance” read at a word recognition accuracy range of 98-100 per cent and an automaticity range of between 138 and 158 words correct per minute.

These findings give us an idea of the reading fluency levels needed to be successful at university, and therefore provide a rough indication of the levels of fluency we should be helping secondary school students to aim for.

Improving reading fluency in secondary school

Recent SATs reading results indicate that there could be some way to go here: around 26 per cent of pupils currently entering secondary school will not be at the “expected standard” for reading. 

With the increased demands of secondary school (for example, we know that the academic vocabulary demand skyrockets), addressing reading fluency may prove to be crucial in helping these students to get to grips with the secondary school curriculum. 

Those who fall clearly below the “normal and appropriate range” for fluency are likely to need specific support.

So, what can teachers do to develop pupils’ reading fluency?

A range of approaches should be considered. First, we should think about the daily reading diet of our pupils. Each day, pupils need lots of exposure to reading - both being read to and practising reading aloud themselves.

In addition to lots of rich reading, pupils may gain from precise fluency instruction: through reading aloud, re-reading, and “echo reading” (in which a more confident reader models reading a passage for the student to repeat). 

We also need to bear in mind that some pupils may be struggling with the foundational ability to decode words on the page and will, therefore, need phonics intervention. And pupils may need support to develop their vocabulary knowledge, too, to get to grips with the complex topics being read. 

Most importantly, the development of reading fluency shouldn’t be seen as the job of primary schools alone. 

As the work of Rasinski and others has shown, reading fluency may be more significant to older readers than we might think - and that means it deserves more of our attention.

Alex Quigley is the national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and the author of Closing the Reading Gap, published by Routledge