An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.

It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.
Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).
Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.
Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
Prosody-the ability to make reading sound like authentic oral speech-is clear evidence of developing fluency (and comprehension-lots of evidence) but can also be encouraged through phrasing activities (Whalley,2006) and pitch rises and falls (Miller,2006)and repeated reading.
However, developing prosody indicates a top-down cognitive approach to reading (Stanovitch, 1980) with the reader bringing knowledge and schema to bear on the text - rather than merely extracting meaning from the words.
Thus, prosody is not merely expression, it is evidence of developing types of knowledge. Think how much easier it is to understand Shakespeare read by an experienced Shakespearean actor because of the prosodic reading.
Accuracy is often the most ignored. Historically, prosody has been the touchstone. Victorian teachers only received pay rises (from inspectors) for prosodic pupils (so they got them to learn the text) so obsessed with fluency was education.
Accuracy relates to instant word recognition which is the next stage after decoding becomes faster. This remarkable human ability to recognise multiple, legitimate letter patterns such that we can read the word faster than the letters is a bottleneck in reading development.
It requires lots and lots of practice and the regular exposure to words which means that it is self-taught (Share, 2002). That does not mean we just leave it to the pupils. The more children read and the more exposures they have to a word, the faster they will develop accuracy.
That requires regular and extended leveraged reading activities (probably whole class) with repeated reading - also used as an intervention - along with assisted reading. Decoding strategies for unknown words need to be well developed.
The danger is that we rush to fluency too quickly without allowing pupils the time to stutter and stumble over words as they develop their orthographic accuracy. As the Roman pedagog Quintilian insisted, reading should be ‘at first sure, then continuous and for a long time slow’
And the beauty of leveraged reading is that it benefits prosodic reading - through teacher-led exemplification - as well as rate through repeated reading.
Some of the instructional practices for fluency with research bases you may want to check out: FLUENCY ORIENTATED READING INSTRUCTION,WIDE READING,ORAL RECITATION LESSON,SHARED BOOK EXPERIENCE,FLUENCY DEVELOPMENT LESSON, RETRIEVAL AUTOMATICITY VOCABULARY ELABORATION ORTHOGRAPHY
GUIDED REPEATED ORAL READING WITH FEEDBACK,READING PARTNER ASSISTED FLUENCY PRACTICE,NEUROLOGICAL IMPRESS METHOD

More from Education

You asked. So here are my thoughts on how osteopathic medical students should respond to the NBOME.

(thread)


Look, even before the Step 2 CS cancellation, my DMs and email were flooded with messages from osteopathic medical students who are fed up with the NBOME.

There is *real* anger toward this organization. Honestly, more than I even heard about from MD students and the NBME.

The question is, will that sentiment translate into action?

Amorphous anger on social media is easy to ignore. But if that anger gets channeled into organized efforts to facilitate change, then improvements are possible.

This much should be clear: begging the NBOME to reconsider their Level 2-PE exam is a waste of your time.

Best case scenario, you’ll get another “town hall” meeting, a handful of platitudes, and some thoughtful beard stroking before being told that they’re keeping the exam.

Instead of complaining to the NBOME, here are a few things that are more likely to bring about real change.

You May Also Like

And here they are...

THE WINNERS OF THE 24 HOUR STARTUP CHALLENGE

Remember, this money is just fun. If you launched a product (or even attempted a launch) - you did something worth MUCH more than $1,000.

#24hrstartup

The winners 👇

#10

Lattes For Change - Skip a latte and save a life.

https://t.co/M75RAirZzs

@frantzfries built a platform where you can see how skipping your morning latte could do for the world.

A great product for a great cause.

Congrats Chris on winning $250!


#9

Instaland - Create amazing landing pages for your followers.

https://t.co/5KkveJTAsy

A team project! @bpmct and @BaileyPumfleet built a tool for social media influencers to create simple "swipe up" landing pages for followers.

Really impressive for 24 hours. Congrats!


#8

SayHenlo - Chat without distractions

https://t.co/og0B7gmkW6

Built by @DaltonEdwards, it's a platform for combatting conversation overload. This product was also coded exclusively from an iPad 😲

Dalton is a beast. I'm so excited he placed in the top 10.


#7

CoderStory - Learn to code from developers across the globe!

https://t.co/86Ay6nF4AY

Built by @jesswallaceuk, the project is focused on highlighting the experience of developers and people learning to code.

I wish this existed when I learned to code! Congrats on $250!!