The Family Fluency Program.

One goal of reading instruction is to help children become fluent readers. When children are fluent they read automatically, decoding words quickly and accurately (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003). Fluent readers read with prosody— that is, they use the appropriate pitch, pace, phrasing, and expression (Schreiber, 1987, 1991). Fluent reading aids comprehension. According to the report of the U.S. National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000), fluency is a predictor of reading success. Although it has been found that fluency is a major goal in reading instruction, teachers are not as familiar as they should be with fluency strategies, and they are not using them regularly (Rasinski, 1989). It is often assumed that if students can decode they will become fluent. Research has indicated that this is not necessarily so, and therefore students need training in fluency strategies (Allington, 1983; Reutzel, 1996). The success of a literacy program, to a certain extent, depends on the literacy environment at home. Successful family literacy programs promote parent-child interaction with many types of literacy events (Wasik, 2004). Involving parents as an integral part of literacy instruction is crucial. Letting parents know how they can help to support the school program at home is important, but home–school programs need to be easy to use. Materials sent home should be introduced to children in school first. The content should be non-threatening and the activities need to be enjoyable (Morrow, Scoblionko, & Shafer, 1995; Morrow & Young, 1997). In a meta-analysis of 20 interventions involving 1,583 families (Senechal, 2003), results clearly showed that parent involvement had a positive effect on children’s reading acquisition. The most effective form of parent involvement, producing the best results, was training parents to use a specific reading strategy that their children were working on in school (Darling & Westberg, 2004). While reviewing literature about family literacy we found many programs that dealt with very young children (e.g., Even Start and Head Start for preschoolers and their parents), but few that dealt with children in the primary grades and beyond (Wasik, 2004). Teachers, other school personnel, and parents must communicate and collaborate with one another to contribute to children’s literacy growth. This is particularly important in schools with diverse populations (Casanova, 1987; Chavkin & Gonzalez, 1995). In the Family Fluency Program our goal was to heighten the awareness of parents, children, and teachers concerning the important roles they collectively play in the literacy development of children. The Family Fluency Program introduced parents whose children were in a fluency program at school to strategies for use at home that would engage their children in fluency development experiences. We wanted to find out if the parents involved in the fluency workshop sessions did the following: -engaged in fluency building activities at home, developed heightened awareness about the importance of fluency training in their child’s literacy development, and increased the level of literacy involvement at home with their children. The Family Fluency Program was part of a larger investigation called Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI; Stahl, Heubach, & Cramond, 1997). Before we discuss the Family Fluency Program, it is important to describe the context in which the program was embedded.