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What Is Fluency?

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The Fluency Construct

Abstract

Fluency is a ubiquitous, but a complicated term. This chapter provides an overview of various conceptions of fluency across a range of disciplines and research contexts as well as discusses implications for research, assessment, and instruction. We include an overview of definitions and exemplars of fluency in language use, reading, and mathematics followed by an exploration of fluency concepts (e.g., automaticity, efficiency, and procedural skill) and considerations for research. The chapter concludes with recommendations for investigations of fluency including attending to measurement issues, explicitly defining and analyzing discrete components of fluency, and leveraging these precise definitions to evaluate the interactions between task and proficiency inherent to fluency exercises.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Interestingly, Samuels has since become one of the more vocal proponents of the importance of not only prosody, but also comprehension in the definition and measurement of oral reading ­fluency (e.g., Samuels, Ediger, & Fautsch-Patridge, 2005; Samuels, 2007).

  2. 2.

    Hasher and Zacks (1979) argue that automaticity should not be applied to processes that benefit from practice, but this perspective is decidedly in the minority (for discussion see Fisk & Schneider, 1984).

  3. 3.

    Note that among reading researchers interested in full isolation of decoding, reading of decodable nonsense words out of context is considered preferable to reading real words out of context because it isolates decoding even from sight recognition and effects of vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Ehri, 2005).

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  1. Center on Teaching and Learning, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Gina Biancarosa & Lina Shanley

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  1. Gina Biancarosa
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  2. Lina Shanley
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Correspondence to Gina Biancarosa .

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  1. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Kelli D. Cummings

  2. Florida State University, Florida State University Florida Center for Reading Research, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    Yaacov Petscher

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Biancarosa, G., Shanley, L. (2016). What Is Fluency?. In: Cummings, K., Petscher, Y. (eds) The Fluency Construct. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2803-3_1

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