I ,I '? I. I. .t H elping St uden ts Be come Accur ate , Expressi ve Read ers: Flue ncy Instruction for Smal l Grou ps Melanie Kuhn nsuring that students become fluent readers is one of the major goals of read- ing instruction (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). One reason for its impor- tance is that flu ent readers no longer have to intentionally decode the majority of words they encounter in a text. Instead, they can recognize words both automatically and accurately. A sec- ond,and equally important, reason is that fluent readers are able to read texts with expression or prosody. It is this combination of accuracy, auto- maticity, and prosody that makes oral reading soundlike spoken language. Finally, it is becom- ing increasingly apparent that fluency plays an important role in terms of a reader's ability to construct meaning from text, the ultimate goal of reading instruction. Although recently the subject has begun to receive greater amounts of attention (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), fluency has often been overlooked within the literacy cur- riculum. There are several reasons why fluency has failed to receive greater emphasis in terms of reading instruction to date. Among these are the prevalence of strategies designed for indi- vidual instruction (Kuhn, 2003), an assumption that increased amounts of decoding instruction would automatically lead to improved fluency (Allington, 1983; Fleisher, Jenkins, & Pany, 1979/1980), and reliance on round-robin reading as one of the primary approaches for oral read- ing instruction (Ash, Kuhn, & Walpole, 2003). Fluency's Role in the Reading Process Before deciding to devote any of the limited time available for reading instruction to improving fluency, it is important to understand the ways in which fluent reading contributes to sk illed reading in general and comprehension in par- ticular. There are two primary ways in which fluency plays a part in learners' reading devel- opment (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000; Samuels, 1979; Schreiber, 1991). The first involves the development of automatic word rec- ognition, while the second deals with prosody, or those elements of fluency that allow oral reading to sound like spoken language. Contribution of Automatic Word Recoqnition to Comprehen sion Skilled readers share certain attributes. For e xample, they are able not only to identify words accurately but also to recognize them instantly. This is important because readers who need to spend a significant portion of their time identifying individual words rarely have enough attention left over to focus on a text' s meaning (Adams, 1990; LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1980). It is also Re print ed from Kuhn , M. (20 04). Helping students become accurate, expre ssive reader s: Fluen cy instructi on for small groups. The Reading Tea cher, 58(4), 338-344 . 39