In the context of reading, the term fluency means the ability to read accurately and quickly. Reading at a certain speed is necessary to grasp the meaning of a text. It’s like riding a bicycle: you have to reach a certain speed to make it work.
Don’t ignore fluency. Decoding and fluency are both are important, but simply being able to decode words– if you can’t do it quickly and automatically–won’t make you a good reader.
Lots of decoding tests are untimed; and such tests often don’t distinguish between students who’ve learned to decode quickly and effortlessly, and students who’ve learned the rules for decoding but can only apply them slowly and with conscious effort. Decoding must be fluent to be functional, just like sentence- or passage-level reading.
