Fluency is the ability to read quickly, accurately and with expression. When students read with expression, it indicates that they understand what they are reading. Strong fluency skills are an indicator that all is well in the decoding and comprehension world for a student.

Students who read fluency can see through the text to the story behind it. Students who are not fluent end up using so much mental desk space to decode that they are not able to see through to the story beyond the text. The bank of stored words that a student brings to the text (their orthographic lexicon) impacts their fluency skills. For students to move beyond constantly decoding as they read, the goal is to have them store words so that they recognize them accurately and instantly at first glance. This is not done by memorizing words by sight but through Orthographic Mapping (see below).