Assessing Reading Fluency.

For years, teachers thought that if students could learn to decode words accurately, they would be successful in reading printed text. While it is true that accuracy in decoding is important for fluency, it is not the entire story. Readers not only need to decode the words accurately; they also need to decode them effortlessly or automatically. The ability to read with appropriate phrasing and expression (interpretation) is also important for fluency. In essence, reading fluency refers to accurate and automatic decoding of the words in the text, along with expressive interpretation of the text, to achieve optimal comprehension. Fluency is important in reading, then, because it affects how well readers understand what they read.