Fluency five – supporting reading comprehension

David Windle is deputy headteacher at London South research School and co-creator of Fluency Focus for the London South Research School. In this blog, he explains the fluency techniques that underpin the Fluency Focus programme, designed to support reading comprehension.

Fluency Focus is a sequence of twenty, whole-class reading lessons for Year 5 pupils, currently undergoing evaluation as a pilot programmefor the EEF. The lessons aim to improve pupils’ reading fluency and consequently their comprehension of challenging texts.

The Fluency Focus programme involves children repeatedly reading text aloud – thinking about the appropriate intonation and expression to use, and therefore unpicking what the author was trying to say through their writing.

The aim is that through this process, honing their delivery of the text, the children will uncover the meaning housed within it.