What it takes to read well
A. Fluency: the ability to read fast and smoothly enough to hear the
reading as speech.
Reading fluency depends on:
1. Phonemic awareness: this means students can produce for themselves

the sounds represented by consonants

the sounds represented by vowels

the syllables of a word

the stressed syllable in a word

the stressed words in a phrase or sentence.
2. Word, phrase and sentence awareness: this means students can
differentiate between

words: where one word ends and other begins

sentences: where one ends and other begins
They can use punctuation to mentally group their reading into phrases,
so they are grouping ideas, which helps them make sense of what they’re
reading.
For example: “Juan, who is from Mexico, loves María, the girl next door.
Living in San Francisco, he only sees her once a year.”
If the student doesn’t stop at the commas and periods, they may read “Mexico
loves Maria” or “Maria the girl next door living in San Francisco”
B. A good reader can read “between the lines” and can draw
conclusions based on assumptions they make as they read.
Comprehension depends on:
1. Schema awareness: this means the students understand the context of the
story or text:
 where,
 when
 why
 what subject
They can anticipate what the text will be about, which helps them guess the
meaning of unfamiliar words or phrases
2. Genre awareness: this means the students know what kind of writing this
is, what the purpose is, what style it will be in, the format it will have.
3. Ability to identify references: this means students can recognize what
words in a phrase, sentence or paragraph are referring to. Students who are
weak readers have trouble creating a mental map of where the story
happens, who the characters are and what they’re doing. They may miss a
word, or misunderstand what it refers to. This can make the following phrase
or sentence confusing. For example in this passage:
Juan was on his way home, and it was getting dark. He usually left work
earlier, but this evening he was running late so he was driving fast. His
headlights seemed unusually bright to him, making it hard to see things in
in front of him. He felt frustrated. Why hadn’t he left earlier?
a strong reader will group the phrases “on his way home” “it was getting dark”
“left work” and “driving” to mean Juan is in his car driving home from work in the
early evening. When they read the word “headlights” they understand that Juan put
on his car headlights. They recognize and that “in front of him” means in front of his
car. They read the question “Why hadn’t he left earlier?” as something Juan asks
himself, not the writer asking the reader.