Chapter 10: Fluency and Automaticity

This chapter mostly concerns itself with, as the title suggests, fluency and automaticity. Automaticity, in this situation, is when students can recognize a majority of words with little or no problems. They have seen the word so often, they see it as a whole and not in separate units, as seen in the example of /window/. Fluency comes out of automaticity and is when a reader is able to read the text smoothly and at a good pace with good phrasing and expression (i.e., not in a monotone with tons of pauses). This ability develops as students begin to recognize more and more words and don't have to spend time sounding out the word. Beers also discusses how to measure fluency, such as oral reading rates which is not always useful, simply because there are so many different factors that can affect the student's reading, such as the content. Obviously, since the content is new and may be more difficult, most people will not be able to read it as fluidly as something they have read before. There is also the silent reading rate, similar to that "test" we took in class where we read a passage, counted the number of words we read in a given time, and then recalled information from this passage.