Two interesting measures of fluency in the readings this week were prosody and endurance.
I always thought of fluency as the traditional "speed and accuracy" measures, but when the concepts of prosody and endurance were explained, they made A LOT of sense.

Prosody  or lack thereof is what made student-lead read-alouds all throughout grade school so painful. No one is engaged by a robotic rendering of A Separate Peace. The students could "read fine" and they didn't struggle with the words or anything, but it was so flat, so rushed. And while, when reading myself, I find very theatrical performances to be super disingenuous, there is definitely a comfortable middle ground there, where one can convey the meaning of the words AND punctuation without feeling like a bad Laurence Olivier impersonater. Maybe I am just way too socially anxious. Anyway.

Here is a really cool tool I found. It's an iPad app that allows readers to try to match the waveforms of a teacher's reading of a passage. It was devised to help students with ASD sound more natural.

prosody app

Endurance was interesting to me because it's something that I don't think was ever assessed for me, but is still like, a skill I remember acquiring. When you can choose longer and longer books and it doesn't intimidate you. Two books can have the same level words, but the one with more pages, up until a certain point, will just seem like too much work. In foreign language classes even now, I can read a dialogue no problem, for instance, but if my teacher asked me to read a prose excerpt I think my eyes would just glaze over.