https://heatherfblog.wordpress.com/2016 ... mment-1235
Is reading fluency important for academic success?
I’d imagine everyone reading this would agree it was very important – crucial in fact.
This description from Quirky Teacher of many children’s reading in year 6 must sound quite familiar to secondary teachers:
I am worried that children in KS2, despite being officially ‘able to read’, are still not really fluent, even when they get to year 6. When you ask them to read to you, they stumble slowly through a text, sometimes randomly substituting trickier and new words, never able to add intonation and not really getting the bigger picture.
As I outlined in my post yesterday that does not mean that at secondary level we ensure children get enough daily reading practice to ensure our students DO read fluently. One reason for this is that the need for bulk practice is not appreciated. There is another reason why, even when the importance of sustained reading is acknowledged, children still don’t end up with enough practice to become fluent readers. This reason can be explained using the economic principle of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.
What is this principle?