**1. Introduction**

Lack of adequate progress in reading achievement among elementary grade students in the United States continues to be a major concern. The most recent (2019) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) [1] reported that 34% of children entering kindergarten are lacking in basic language skills that promote reading acquisition and 64% of fourth graders read below grade level. Moreover, these statistics have not changed substantially over the past 25 years. This stagnation in reading growth leads to a probable conclusion that instructional factors that promote early reading development are either missing or are receiving less-than-optimal emphases in many curricular reading programs.

This is not a new idea, that something of extreme importance is missing in our reading instructional programs to promote and support foundational reading development. Allington [2] proposed that a viable reason for so many students struggling in reading is that they are not fluent readers and fluency is often a relatively neglected component in reading instruction curricula and instructional protocols. He claimed that the ability to read with ease and expression, that is reading fluency, is often observed as lacking in struggling readers. Furthermore, fluency is essential to competent reading and that reading educators, curriculum developers, and policy makers should make it an integral part of their theoretical models of reading and reading curricula in the elementary grades.

The theoretical underpinnings to fluency lie in the work of LaBerge and Samuels' [3] theory of automatic information processing in reading, Logan's [4] instance theory of automatization, and Perfetti's [5] verbal e fficiency model of reading. LaBerge and Samuels posit that reading is a multi-task activity. Two of the major tasks in the act of reading are word recognition and comprehension. They also argue that readers have a limited amount of attentional or cognitive resources. When readers have to employ a large amount of their attentional resources to the word identification reading task, they have less available for comprehension. As a result, comprehension su ffers. The solution to this problem is to automatize word recognition. By automaticity, LaBerge and Samuels mean the ability to recognize most words instantly and e ffortlessly in the way that most proficient readers do. By minimizing the amount of attentional resources required for word recognition, readers can then apply those resources to comprehension. Stanovich [6] further elaborated on the LaBerge and Samuels theory by suggesting that di fficulty, or a lack of fluency, in reading could be explained by a lack of automaticity in the bottom-up word decoding process, which restricted those readers in employing their cognitive resources for the more cognitive demanding top-down reading comprehension process.

A complementary theoretical perspective on fluency comes from work in the prosodic components found in oral reading [7–12]. This perspective suggests that reading fluency is achieved when readers are able to embed in their oral reading prosody or expression that reflects syntactic and semantic aspects of the text being read. Confirmatory research has subsequently found that prosody is associated with proficient reading [13–17].

Reading fluency has since been accepted as a key competency in reading development and instruction as suggested by the Report of the National Reading Panel [18], comprehensive reviews of reading fluency [19–23] and in policy documents in the United States such as the Common Core State Standards [24].

Despite this seeming consensus about the importance of fluency, it continues to receive somewhat limited emphasis in actual reading instructional protocols in the United States [25]. Rasinski [26] notes that in the annual "What's Hot" survey of reading scholars, reading fluency has consistently been identified as a "not hot" topic. Moreover, these same scholars report that reading fluency does not deserve to be a hot topic. Indeed, in the most recent survey [27] reading fluency was not even included.

Rasinski [26] suggests that there are several reasons for the limited emphasis on fluency instruction in reading curricula. Fluency is most often associated primarily with oral, not silent, reading and automatic word recognition is often mischaracterized as reading fast. Moreover, there is a widespread view that it is a competency that is only important in the primary grades. Another inaccurate view of fluency is the dissociation of it with reading comprehension, which of course is the ultimate goal of reading. Each of these characterizations is incorrect; reading fluency is indeed an essential piece for proficient reading, ranging from foundational skills through competent reading. Investigations of reading in the early 20th century [28] recognized that fluency enables the mind of the reader to move from a text level focus to a meaning level focus. Fluency promotes increasingly e fficient (automatic) word identification that allows the reader to devote more cognitive resources to comprehension [29,30]. Still, a prevailing attitude in many reading instructional programs is that fluency does not deserve high status among priorities in teaching reading.

#### **2. Defining Fluency**

As mentioned earlier, fluency in reading is a complex competency, made up of two distinct sub-competencies. One sub-competency is word recognition automaticity, which refers to the ability of readers to instantly recognize written words and phrases, with minimum cognitive e ffort. The significance of this competency is that with automaticity readers are able to reserve their finite cognitive resources for reading comprehension [4,31]. Word recognition automaticity is a problematic concept in that it is not the same as and can be confused with word recognition accuracy. Although a reader may be able to decode words accurately, this is not the same as decoding words automatically. A reader who is automatic in word recognition identifies words instantly from lexical memory without the need to apply cognitive resources for decoding [32,33]. Simply becoming proficient in phonics or word decoding is not su fficient for fluent reading. Such accurate readers often read in a slow and e ffortful manner that limits the amount of cognitive resources that can be devoted to comprehension. Literacy professionals who advocate phonics only for proficient reading miss the point that accuracy in word recognition is a necessary but still insu fficient condition for accomplished reading. It is automaticity in word recognition that is the ultimate goal when it comes to word decoding and foundational reading competency [24]. Automaticity is typically assessed by speed of reading. Readers who read faster are assumed to be fast because they are able to recognize words automatically. A good deal of research has associated speed of reading with comprehension and overall reading achievement [19] and it has become a fairly common assessment tool in general reading instruction.

The second component of fluency is prosody or expression during oral reading [19,21,22,34]. Indeed, fluent speech is often characterized by the extent to which speakers are able to use prosodic or melodic elements of their voices to assist in communicating meaningful messages; in other words, their reading sounds like real language. Similarly, a reader's use of prosody while reading orally provides evidence that the reader is monitoring and capturing the meaning of the written text. Prosody is normally assessed informally in a classroom setting by a teacher listening to the oral reading of a text and then rating the reading according to a descriptive rubric. Research on prosody has demonstrated that it is associated with comprehension and overall proficiency in reading [14,15,34–36].

#### **3. Teaching Fluency**

Since the automaticity component of fluency presupposes accuracy in word recognition, the conventional wisdom is that fluency instruction should normally occur at the same time, or subsequent to phonics instruction. Several scholars describe essential approaches to fluency instruction that include modeling fluent reading for students, assisted reading where a student reads a text while simultaneously hearing a fluent rendering of the same text, wide reading practice, dyad or paired reading, and deep or repeated reading practice where a student practices a text multiple times until the student's reading reaches fluency [37–40].

A more intensive approach to fluency instruction involves integrating those separate elements describe above in a comprehensive lesson format. The Fluency Development Lesson (FDL) was developed as such an approach for students deemed at risk for fluency acquisition [37]. The FDL is a daily lesson that has as its goal fluent reading of a new text, usually a poem. In the FDL the teacher chooses a new brief text each day for students to practice to the point of fluency. Poems for children are ideal for this activity as their brevity along with the rhythm and rhyme in the poems make them easy for students to master. Two copies of each daily text are made for every student. A display copy is also provided for students to view and read as a group. Teachers select their daily poems from a variety of online resources and stocks of poems available in the school. Poems are selected based on their perceived interest to students and a general sense that the poems are in a readable range for students. More challenging poems could be selected with the understanding that students would require more support in order to achieve mastery of them.

The teacher begins each 20-minute FDL by reading with students the text mastered from the previous day. Then, focus changes to the new text where the teacher reads the text aloud to the students two to three times while the students follow along silently. The teacher changes the manner in which they read in order to allow students to consider various styles or versions of oral reading. After the text is read aloud, the class engages in a brief discussion of the text and how it was actually read. Next, students read the text chorally two to three times, in various forms, along with the teacher. Again, the teacher creates variety by asking di fferent groups of students to take the lead in the choral reading. Following choral reading, students work in groups of two or three to continue practicing the text. One student reads the text two to three times while the partner student follows along, provides assistance when necessary, and tells the reader what was liked about the reading; then the roles are reversed. During this portion of the lesson the teacher walks around the classroom coaching, supporting, and giving formative feedback to individuals and groups of students as needed while other students continue to rehearse. At this point in the lesson, students have read the daily text six to twelve times. In order to provide an incentive for that amount of practice, individual students and small groups are then asked to perform their text for their classmates, other classrooms, or other members of the school community. The focus of the performance is on prosodic and meaningful readings of the text.

Following the performance of the text by students, they are engaged in a brief word study activity. Eight to ten words from the text are chosen by the teacher and students. Students read the words in isolation and then engage in one of several word work activities, which include analyzing and expanding on rhymes found in words, word sorts, and word games.

The lesson ends with students archiving one of copy of the text in their folders. The other copy of text is sent home for additional practice with parents and family members. Parents are alerted prior to the implementation of the FDL about the importance and need for continued practice and repeated readings at home. They are encouraged to make a special e ffort to listen to their children read and provide positive feedback on their reading. The following day the FDL procedure is repeated with a new text.

Research has shown that multi-feature fluency interventions, such as the FDL, have been e ffective in improving various aspects of reading, including reading comprehension [19]. A meta-analysis by Stevens, Walker, and Vaughn [23] examined 19 studies between 2001 and 2014 on the impact of various fluency interventions on elementary-grade students experiencing learning di fficulties. They concluded that repeated reading, assisted reading, and multi-feature interventions produced significant improvements in both students' fluency and comprehension. Other studies employing specifically the FDL have demonstrated improvements in various reading competencies (word recognition accuracy, automaticity, prosody, and comprehension) for second graders [41], third graders [42], fourth graders [43], and students in a clinic reading intervention setting [44,45].

Phonology and explicit phonics instruction should be the primary focus of instructional activities for developing reading foundational skills in grade one [46–48] and it has been generally thought that fluency instruction should proceed after students have achieved some degree of competency in word recognition. Research has not generally focused on the e ffects of the use of the fluency instruction, including the FDL, in conjunction with foundational skills instruction. The present study examined the e ffects of the regular use of FDL in self-contained first grade classrooms. The study used a general reading growth measure to determine the e ffects of the FDL instruction.
