PLD routinely revisits and reviews the existing research to ensure our programs continue to reflect current best practices. This blog revisits and extends the topic of fluency. An earlier blog on the topic can be found here. 

Helping students become accurate and automatic readers is central to reading comprehension and confidence. Reading fluency is generally described as comprising three components: accuracy, rate and expression (or prosody). Students with weak fluency often misread words, read slowly with obvious effort, and read aloud in a monotone or robotic manner with limited expression.

Oral Fluency Measures & Words Read Correctly Per Minute

Words correct per minute (WCPM) is used as an indicator of reading fluency by measuring how many words a student reads accurately in one minute. WCPM naturally varies with text difficulty and, therefore, treating WCPM as a range, rather than one singular score, may be more appropriate when using one of PLD’s dictation passages or the next page in the student’s reading book.

A widely referenced source for typical WCPM is the Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017) study. The interquartile range (25th-75th percentile), reflects the middle 50% of WCPM scores for students in the first and second half of Year 1 to Year 3. Schools can use this range to understand the typical growth and to flag students who may require support.

A percentile is a way of showing how a score or value compares to a group of other scores. The higher the percentile, the better your performance compared to the group. 

Imagine you have a lineup of 100 students from the lowest to the highest score on a test. If you are at the 70th percentile, it means you scored higher than 70 out of the 100 students (or 70% of the time). The 25th-75th percentile is the ‘typical’ or middle range; a student scoring below this range would be considered ‘below the typical range’. 

How to interpret percentiles

In the table above, the shaded area highlights the range that is most relevant for teachers. Students scoring within or above this range are typically reading with sufficient fluency to maximise comprehension. While Hasbrouck and Tindal’s (2017) norms provide valuable insight, Konza (2012) recommendations may be more useful to know if students have become fluent readers. According to Konza (2012):

• By the end of Year 1: 60 words correct per minute.
• By the end of Year 2: 90-100 words correct per minute.
• Years 3–6 students: 100–120 words correct per minute.
• Skilled adult readers: approximately 180 words correct per minute.

PLD Recommendations for Monitoring Fluency

1. Measure growth over time for students of concern. Collect WCPM on comparable, unfamiliar passages and plot each student’s results to check the trajectory over time. Looking for an upward trend as teaching and intervention take effect.
2. If growth stalls, adjust intensity of instruction (e.g. increase the frequency of monitored repeated reading, revisit word accuracy and vocabulary).
3. For more accurate results, use a standardised oral fluency tool where possible. The DIBLES is a freely accessible assessment that has its own normative data to refer to. As the data is collected with the same passages as tested, the results may be more accurate.
4. Consider other factors, such as prosody, when reading. Cue students to give their best reading, not their fastest reading.

What Improves Reading Fluency

• Orthographic mapping: secure, meaningful word representations drive automatic recognition (Ehri, 2014). Some students will map words after a few encounters; others may need far more repeated practise. Skipping this step shows up later on when students are unable to read low-frequency or multisyllabic words. 
• Avoid round-robin (one line read per student once) and unguided silent reading for fluency goals. Rather, aim for repeated (around four), monitored oral reading with feedback.
• Aim for 95% accuracy of reading before focusing on fluency. An accuracy of 90% or below will lead to frustration over building fluency. 
• Short texts for momentum. Brief, decodable texts support initial success and confidence.

It is important to note that reading fluency benchmarks remain a highly understudied area of literacy, with Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017) and Konza (2012) being the most frequently cited sources. For this reason, these values should be interpreted with caution and only used to guide support and instruction for students, rather than fixed cut-off points.

Reference List

Ehri, L. C. (2014). “Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning.” Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21. DOI: 1080/10888438.2013.819356.

Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (No. 1702, pp. 1-17). Technical report.

Konza, D. (2011). Research into practice. Understanding the reading process. Department of Education and Children’s Services. Government of South Australia, 1, 1-8.

Additional Readings

PLD Blog 1 (2022) Words Correct Per Minute: An Insight into Fluency https://pld-literacy.org/words-read-correct-per-minute-an-insight-into-fluency/

PLD Blog 2 (2020) Two Evidence-Based Strategies to Improve Reading Fluency https://pld-literacy.org/reading-fluency-continuous-reading-vs-repeated-reading/

Five from Five (2025) https://fivefromfive.com.au/fluency/