S6 E12 - When Repeated Reading Doesn't Work

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Welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I am so pleased to welcome you here.
One of the wonderful developments in schools in the past couple of years is that the focus on explicit literacy instruction has extended to the upper primary grades. When we first ran our workshop and online course, Build the Foundations for your Upper Primary Literacy Block, teachers were dabbling. Now, in September 2025, many schools are actively establishing consistent practices in Years 3-6.

One of the main areas of focus for many teachers is fluency. With the adoption of normed reading assessment like DIBELS, we are more conscious of the importance of fluency than ever. Having normed assessment, where we have unambiguous data about rate and accuracy, means that teachers have a real picture, often for the first time, of where students are up to in fluency. As they say, where focus goes, energy flows. Seeing students struggle means that we want to act.

This means that the focus in many 3-6 classrooms is establishing repeated reading practices to address fluency challenges. This is a great thing to do and I have no doubt that teachers are seeing benefits. It's also possible that there are students whose data isn't moving appropriately, despite consistent repeated reading. Let's dive in to why this might be and explore some key actions.

Understanding Fluency

To nut out this issue, we need to go back to the beginning and unpack the elements of fluency. Fluency has 3 components: accuracy, rate, and prosody.

Accuracy is, obviously, about reading words correctly. We've always measured accuracy. What we're looking for, though, is 96% accuracy of an unseen text to say that a student is on track.

Rate is the speed at which a student reads. In normed assessment, this is measured in words correct per minute. This changes each year and varies over the grades of school. Year 1 is around 60 words per minute, Year 2, 90 words per minute, and then the expectations increase and fluctuate from there, depending on which tool you're using.

The third area is prosody, and that relates to phrasing and expression.

When we understand the components of fluency, and how to read our data, we're in a good position to understand the needs of our students and make decisions for instruction. Having data and being able to profile students means that we can easily choose instructional actions that respond to their needs. This kind of data analysis enables responsive teaching, which is why it's an important inclusion in Leading Learning Success. Teachers learn to identify one of four broad categories: slow and accurate, speedy and accurate, slow and inaccurate, and fast and inaccurate. Each of these learning profiles has specific reasons and responses.

Now, let's circle back to the focus of this episode, which is repeated reading and when it can and might not be of greatest use.

Student Profile 1: Already Fluent Readers

These students will show up as being green or blue in DIBELS and, when you listen to them read, they have lovely phrasing and expression. These students are not the target focus for repeated reading. For students who are already fluent readers, the focus shifts to wide reading to increase the number of texts they are encountering. In your partner reading time in the literacy block, these students may well express resentment at being asked to reread texts that they have already read well and that they already understand. And that's fair enough. If students are speedy and accurate, but their prosody isn't great, you can address this through reading across the curriculum, by having shared text that students read with you and that you can highlight sentences and phrases for repeated reading across the class to point out the prosody.

Student Profile 2: Accurate but Slow Readers

This group of students benefits the most from repeated reading of grade-appropriate texts that are a little trickier than they could read themselves confidently. And what I'm talking about here are not students who are still learning to decode, we're talking about students who've reached the threshold and they may be accurate, as identified in your assessment data, but slow.

We have a Research to the Classroom series all about Dyad reading as a form of repeated reading to support students in this category.

It's also worth noting that morphology instruction is useful for these students because it helps them to read more accurately and quickly because they can use the morphemes to lift words from the page rather than the graphemes, which is a much more efficient process for long words. If your school is using Spelling Success in Action, you've got all that you need to make this happen.

Student Profile 3: Fast but Inaccurate Readers

There could be a few reasons for this, but the first thing to do is to reinforce with the student that 'first comes accuracy, then comes speed'. Inaccurate, fast readers are probably rushing, either from habit or because they have some challenge with attention and impulse control. These students benefit from repeated reading, but they really need to have reading time with adults who can direct their reading and refocus them when they try to move on from incorrectly read words. It's good for them to do partner reading as well, so we're not saying only reading with adults, but they really do need an adult in the picture.

It's also important to investigate phonics and word level knowledge for these students because the reason for the inaccuracy could be a lack of knowledge at that level. This needs to go beyond the correct letter sounds in DIBELS, because DIBELS doesn't test for the full code. Most of what you need to score a green or blue result in correct letter sounds in DIBELS is the basic code with just a couple of vowel digraphs. You can find a free whole class spelling test that will tell you what code knowledge students are missing on our website at jocelynseamereducation.com/free-resources. If a student can recall graphemes and spell words, well they will be able to read them, it would be a case study of one for this not to be the case. A spelling test is a reliable and efficient way to check on student knowledge at this level.

Student Profile 4: Slow and Inaccurate Readers

They are the ones that keep us awake at night. It's important to remember when we're thinking about these students that accuracy comes first, and speed comes later, so the main focus for the student in this category is to address accuracy concerns. That means the primary focus for these students is phonics.

It's important that students in the slow and inaccurate category have phonics tested for reading as well as spelling. You don't need a special intervention-focused test for this. The phoneme grapheme correspondence assessment included with your phonics program is just fine. Resource Room members and schools using Reading Success in Action have access to one of these assessments.

The question you are answering here is: which specific graphemes is the student missing? The response is to teach these graphemes in a direct, explicit way that includes both reading and writing of words, reading at sentence and text level, and writing at sentence level. It is also a good idea to investigate phonological and phonemic awareness difficulties for a student who is obviously having trouble blending. So if the student can blend but they don't know the code, then your focus is on the code. If the student is struggling with the blending and with the code, then both of those need to be a focus. But I do need to say that the answer to the blending or the phonemic awareness piece is not oral phonemic awareness. It is word work with graphemes that the student has learned.

The Foundation Principle

Doing some diagnostic assessment and acting on what we find prevents the situation that many teachers and students are finding themselves in at the moment. There's a lot of energy going into text level reading practice, but minimal, if any, improvements in reading fluency. And I'm going to say this again and invite you to make a big banner for your classroom and your staffroom: First comes accuracy, then comes speed.

Without accuracy built on a solid foundation of phonics knowledge, nothing else we do is going to make the difference we're looking for in fluency. Once the phonics foundations are there - that is, the student can read and write words with 60-70 graphemes - we need to deepen their knowledge of morphology to take them the next step beyond single syllable words.

I know it feels counterintuitive to be discussing spelling and phonics when we're talking about addressing student fluency. After all, surely text level fluency issues require a text level focus. While choosing the right text for fluency work is important, and you will have students reading different texts in the partner reading time in the classroom, text level reading alone will not address fluency issues if the student cannot reliably and automatically lift the words from the page because their foundational knowledge is weak.

Conclusion

So there you have it - when repeated reading doesn't work, it's likely because we haven't matched the intervention or approach to the student's specific needs. For fluent readers, it's about expanding their reading diet. For accurate but slow readers, repeated reading with appropriately challenging texts is perfect. For fast but inaccurate readers, we need to slow things down and address both accuracy and any underlying phonics gaps. And for slow and inaccurate readers, we need to go right back to those foundational phonics skills.

Remember, assessment informs instruction. It is also the way we evaluate the impact we're making with the work that we're doing.

For students who are older and sitting in that slow and inaccurate space, don't expect to see fluency gains overnight, but we should be seeing them within a term or two, but we really should be noticing them at sentence and phrase-level first, so we need to keep our eye out on is the work we're doing improving the students' word level accuracy, leading up with practice to the phrasing and phrase level accuracy, then sentences, because that's what's going to get us, and them, to that text level fluency we're looking for. Also, remember this if the student is a naturally slow processor, that is, everything they do is slow and you know that they need more thinking time than all the other students all of the time, don't push for them to be faster. They cannot read faster than they think and speak. So for those students, what we're looking for is accuracy and reading that is at the rate of the normal speech.

I know that you can feel like there are a lot of moving parts in this fluency piece, but use data as your friend, pinpoint the reasons for the lack of fluency and address them one at a time. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I hope this has been useful in helping you think through your fluency instruction challenges in a more targeted way.

Until next time, happy teaching. Bye.

References

For further reading on fluency development and assessment:

• National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction
• Seamer, J. (2023). Reading Success in the Early Primary School. Routledge.
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319531011_Fluency_matters

If you'd like to find out more about our research-informed professional learning, click here.