Reading with proper expression brings better comprehension and retention. As children often comment, “If you don’t ride your bike fast enough, you fall off.” This analogy can be applied to reading fluency and comprehension. If a student struggles to recognize the words and laboriously reads a page, the meaning can get lost and the student may not remember what he or she read.

Reading fluency is often perceived as recognizing words effortlessly while reading fast and smoothly. "Although automaticity (automatic word recognition) and fluency are used interchangeably, they do not measure the same skill in reading. Automaticity refers only to accurate, speedy word recognition, not to reading with expression. The National Reading Panel defines reading fluency as reading with speed, accuracy, and proper expression.” (NRP 2003)

Reader’s Theater is the best tool to help students improve reading with proper expression, because the acting out of story dialogue compels readers to work more closely with the text to interpret and project meaning into the experience.

View a 30-second video (right) demonstrating how emphasizing one word in the sentence, “I didn’t say she liked him,” changes the meaning of the sentence.

 
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"Inflection” EXERCISE
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MEASURING READING EXPRESSION

A good test for reading fluency should gauge a student’s reading rate (speed), accuracy and proper expression. Assessing reading speed and accuracy is pretty straightforward.  Measuring reading expression is the most subjective.  The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has developed a 4-point expressiveness rubric to minimize the subjectivity of grading expressiveness and accounts for most of the important variations. It measures expressiveness by how the student reads phrases, adheres to the author’s syntax and sentence structure, and injects feeling into his or her oral reading. (See chart below.)