A Blog about Fluency – building the bridge to understanding
A blog by Carl Sherlock HMI
What does it really mean to be a fluent reader?
As we mark International Literacy Day on 8 September, we are reminded that literacy is a fundamental right and a foundation for learning and participation in society.
As part of Estyn’s enhanced focus on reading, we will be looking closely at the progress pupils make as readers and how effectively schools support that development. Understanding fluency, what it is and how it develops, is an important part of that picture.
Fluent reading involves much more than getting words off the page. It means reading with accuracy, appropriate pace and expression and, crucially, with understanding.
From decoding to fluency
Systematic phonics provides an essential foundation for learning to read, enabling pupils to connect the sounds of spoken language with letters and patterns in print and decode unfamiliar words.
But phonics is not the end point. As pupils develop, they need increasingly to recognise words accurately and automatically, freeing their attention to focus on meaning. Ehri’s (2014) research into orthographic mapping helps explain this transition. Repeated connections between sounds, spellings and meaning secure words in pupils’ long-term memory and make automatic recognition increasingly possible. Systematic phonics is essential, but it is not sufficient to develop fluent, confident readers.
Hudson, Lane and Pullen (2005) define fluency as “the accurate reading of connected text, at a conversational rate with appropriate prosody or expression.” This brings together:
- accuracy – reading words correctly
- automaticity – recognising words quickly and effortlessly
- prosody – reading with appropriate phrasing, expression, intonation, stress and rhythm.
These do not develop in a simple sequence from decoding, to fluency, to comprehension. Reading development is interconnected. From the earliest stages, word reading develops alongside oral language, vocabulary and understanding.
As recognition becomes more automatic, pupils have greater capacity to follow ideas, make connections and draw inferences. In this sense, fluency provides a cognitive bridge between decoding and comprehension.
Listening to how pupils read
Reading aloud can tell us a great deal. One pupil might decode every word accurately but read hesitantly, one word at a time. Another may group words into meaningful phrases, respond to punctuation and use stress and intonation to reflect meaning.
This prosody is more than putting on an expressive voice. Appropriate phrasing can indicate that pupils are processing sentence structure and understanding how words and ideas fit together. International research identifies a strong relationship between oral reading fluency and comprehension, while OECD (2023) evidence shows that fluency is a significant predictor of reading comprehension across languages.
Teachers can support this by modelling fluent reading, discussing how punctuation affects phrasing, and giving pupils purposeful opportunities to listen, rehearse and re-read texts aloud. Reading aloud to and with pupils, therefore remains valuable beyond the point at which pupils have learned the basics of decoding.
Fluency needs practice – and challenge
Becoming fluent also depends on reading frequently. Stanovich (1986) described a ‘Matthew Effect’ where pupils who read more become more efficient readers and accumulate vocabulary and background knowledge, making subsequent reading easier. For pupils who read less, the opposite cycle can develop, a ‘rich get richer, poor get poorer’ effect in which early advantages or disadvantages become increasingly amplified over time.
However, simply providing more reading time is unlikely to be enough. Pupils also need appropriate challenge, a ‘calibrated stretch’. Texts should be sufficiently accessible for pupils to read with accuracy while gradually introducing more sophisticated vocabulary, language patterns and ideas.
Downs, Young and Cole (2025), for example, found that upper-primary pupils who practised repeated reading of increasingly complex texts made stronger gains in accuracy and rate than those working only with simpler material.
The important balance is between challenge and support: modelling where necessary, revisiting vocabulary, allowing pupils to re-read and gradually reducing support as independence grows.
Developing reading stamina
Fluent readers also need stamina. They need the cognitive endurance to sustain attention and understanding across extended texts, hold ideas in mind and persist when vocabulary or ideas become difficult. This can require a degree of delayed gratification – staying with a text as ideas, characters or narratives develop, rather than expecting meaning or reward to be immediate.
The Welsh literary academic Barbara Hardy described narrative as a “primary act of mind”, arguing that narrative is fundamental to how we organise experience and make sense of our lives. This helps us see reading stamina as more than simply being able to read for longer. Extended encounters with literature allow pupils to follow ideas, characters and narratives as they develop, inhabit different perspectives and make connections across a whole text.
Slides, summaries, short extracts and online texts all have a useful place in learning. However, if they routinely replace extended, connected texts, pupils have fewer opportunities to practise sustaining attention and following ideas over time. This may be particularly important in a digital environment. Recent research suggests that overexposure to digital media may affect pupils’ willingness to sustain attention and apply cognitive effort when engaging with demanding texts (Shen, 2025). Instead, pupils need regular opportunities to read extended, connected texts that require sustained focus and engagement with ideas over time (Scholastic Education, 2026).
However, stamina is not developed through endurance alone, however. What pupils read matters too. Rich and engaging texts can allow pupils to enter another world, encounter unfamiliar ideas and experiences, or provoke an emotional or intellectual response. Good texts can stretch pupils without overwhelming them and give them a reason to persist.
This is particularly important in Wales. The National Literacy Trust’s Children and young people’s reading in 2025 reported that just 12.5% of children and young people in Wales said they read daily in their free time.
What does this mean for schools?
Developing fluent readers is therefore about both skill and will, helping pupils become increasingly competent readers while creating the conditions in which they choose to read and persist when reading becomes challenging.
For teachers and leaders, this raises some useful questions:
- How well do we understand pupils’ reading fluency, including their accuracy, automaticity and ability to read with appropriate phrasing and expression?
- How effectively do we model fluent reading and give pupils opportunities to listen, rehearse and re-read worthwhile texts?
- How well do we balance challenge and support so that pupils encounter increasingly ambitious vocabulary, language and texts without overwhelming meaning or motivation?
- How well do we provide opportunities for pupils to sustain their reading through extended, rich and varied texts that interest, challenge and inspire them?
- How coherently do our approaches build pupils’ fluency, vocabulary, knowledge, stamina and enjoyment of reading over time and across the curriculum?
Ultimately, the aim is not simply for pupils to get words accurately off the page. It is for them to enter a text, sustain their attention, connect ideas, infer, question, imagine and respond.
Fluency is the bridge that makes meaning possible.