Speed Is (Not Necessarily) What We Need

While there are quite a few pre-conceived notions about what fluency is, or what it's supposed to be, we should all be on the same page with the following: 

Fluency means reading not at a rate that's high, but reading at a rate that's appropriate for the reader’s age (the rule of thumb is generally [your age] x 10/per minute]) with comprehension. Unless there’s some comprehension component built into them, those speed-reading exercises are about as useful as they've always been; that is to say, not very much. 

It’s a little more complicated than this, especially for our very slow readers out there—read too slowly and you end up forgetting what was at the start of a text, read too quickly and the focus is on speed, not understanding.  Either way, comprehension becomes compromised...so then the question becomes, why was the text assigned if not to understand it, respond to it, discuss it, etc...? 

At the heart of what we need to talk about is vocabulary acquisition and development, marrying writing activities with reading as often as possible, and engaging in close reading with students (basically compelling them to re-visit the same text using different perspectives and/or for varying purposes). 

Although many would say the following is a radical way of approaching fluency, I’d like to put something out there as food for thought: thinking is quickest, speaking is fast, but not as quick as thought, reading is slowest of all… 

"What if we attacked fluency indirectly through discussion?"

A great site: https://wiki.geneseo.edu/display/cultural/Accuracy+and+Fluency+Wiki