{"id":25489,"date":"2025-08-12T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nwea.org\/blog\/?p=25489"},"modified":"2025-08-11T11:10:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T18:10:23","slug":"5-ways-to-boost-reading-fluency-for-middle-and-high-school-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nwea.org\/blog\/2025\/5-ways-to-boost-reading-fluency-for-middle-and-high-school-students\/","title":{"rendered":"5 ways to boost reading fluency for middle and high school students"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I was a shy, introverted kid, the kind who turned beet red when asked to read aloud in class, even in high school. I dreaded it. And I wasn\u2019t alone. Round robin reading didn\u2019t just make me self-conscious; it chipped away at my confidence and fluency. As it turns out, research backs this up: round robin reading isn\u2019t just ineffective; it can be harmful<\/a>, especially for students who struggle with reading fluency.<\/p>\n

So why is this outdated routine still showing up in classrooms? Often, it\u2019s because we teach the way we were taught. Familiar practices feel safe\u2014and they rarely get questioned. Meanwhile, educational research doesn\u2019t always reach classrooms quickly. It can take years, even decades, for new findings to shift old routines.<\/p>\n

Following the research, old and new<\/h2>\n

Many educators understand that reading comprehension is a cognitively demanding task, and it can break down for many reasons: limited vocabulary, lack of background knowledge, and unfamiliar syntax, to name a few. But fewer people know how reading actually happens in the brain<\/a>. For example, research shows that fluent readers can devote more mental energy to making meaning<\/a> from a text, while disfluent readers spend most of their cognitive resources on decoding. This is the essence of the decoding threshold hypothesis<\/a>: until decoding becomes automatic, comprehension suffers. As the field gains greater awareness of this threshold, we also gain new opportunities to support older readers in building fluency.<\/p>\n

At the same time, educational research continues to evolve, offering deeper insights into how we read<\/a> and how we should teach reading. For decades, studies showed a moderate correlation between reading fluency and comprehension, leading many educators to believe that fluency was simply a byproduct or outcome of comprehension. Emerging research now suggests a causal connection<\/a>: fluency doesn\u2019t just accompany comprehension\u2014it enables it. This new understanding is important because it shifts our thinking about disfluency from being a minor obstacle that slows readers down to what it really is: a significant barrier to comprehension<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why fluency is a growing concern in secondary classrooms<\/h2>\n

For years, The Nation\u2019s Report Card<\/a> has indicated a problem with reading comprehension for eighth-graders, with a main contributor being a lack of fluency. Today, there is even greater urgency to address this problem for two key reasons: 1) many students missed foundational reading instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) other students never received explicit phonics instruction in the first place. As a result, secondary teachers are now facing a challenge that was once the domain of early elementary teachers: helping students become fluent readers. If you\u2019re a secondary teacher feeling a bit out of your depth, I\u2019d like to offer the following better (and research-backed!) ways to boost reading fluency for older students.<\/p>\n

1. Start with empathy<\/h2>\n

To understand the issue of disfluency in middle and high school, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of a disfluent, adolescent reader. Disfluent readers may mispronounce words, skip punctuation, stumble over multisyllabic terms, or struggle with pacing and breath control. These challenges can be especially discouraging for adolescent readers, particularly when reading in front of their peers.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there are more effective and adolescent-friendly ways to build reading fluency<\/a>, such as through echo reading, partner reading, repeated readings, and even a strategy for fostering conversations around \u201cjuicy sentences.\u201d<\/a>These fluency routines aren\u2019t hard to implement\u2014and they\u2019re way less mortifying for teenagers.<\/p>\n

2. Recognize what makes reading harder in middle and high school<\/h2>\n

Reading fluency challenges don\u2019t disappear in upper grades, but they do change. A growing body of research shows how fluency is different for older students. There are three key differences:<\/p>\n