A Superpower Boost: Multilingual Learners and the Fluency Development Lesson

Lynne Kulich, Ph.D.
2024 | 7 minutes

It’s Saturday morning, 1975. My brother and I are watching our favorite superheroes cartoon to find out what the twins, Zan and Jayna, will become and how their ability to shape-shift will save the day from catastrophe. Like most superheroes, the twins had an extraordinary ability that helped them accomplish incredible feats. For this extraordinary ability to work, however, it needed to be fueled. The superheroes had to touch their fists and say, “Wonder Twin powers, activate!” Even when activated, though, these superheroes needed an additional boost of support from time to time.

While Zan and Jayna may have been fictional characters, we encounter superheroes with superpowers every day here on planet Earth. In the real world, these superheroes are Multilingual Learners (MLLs) and their superpower is multilingualism/multiliteracy. But, just like our favorite cartoon or comic superheroes, these learners need their powers fueled and sometimes even a little bit of help.

Multilingual Learners—The Superheroes

The number of MLLs, including students learning English, continues to rise. According to the National Education Association, in 2025, 1 out of 4 children in classrooms throughout the United States will be learning English. This necessitates a deep understanding about how to leverage these superheroes’ superpowers and how to select the right supports when needed.

When I was teaching first grade, I loved having Multilingual Learners in my classroom. These superheroes brought their culture, rich with language, experiences, and traditions, to share with everyone. For example, while reading about the Chinese New Year, my students were fortunate to experience, first-hand, how Bin and his family celebrated. Bin’s family shared food, art, and stories with the class. All my students, whether multilingual or monolingual, benefited from these diverse experiences, which served as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors (Bishop, 1990).

Valuing these experiences supported an asset-based approach to teaching Multilingual Learners who are language rich, not language poor. They are developing skills to thrive in a diverse society and contribute in ways we haven’t yet imagined—they have superpowers! Imagine navigating two or more languages in real time, making sense of explicit and implicit context clues, and responding appropriately based on the audience. Besides the obvious language skills, MLLs develop perseverance, resiliency, and collaboration—all twenty-first century skills. There’s no other superhero cape I’d want to wear.

Fluency—Superpower Fuel

Fluency is the ability to read with automaticity, accuracy, and prosody to derive and communicate meaning. Think of fluency as a metaphorical bridge connecting word recognition and language comprehension skills with reading comprehension. Without fluency instruction, students are challenged to cross that bridge.

Fluency, therefore, is a fuel that helps MLLs leverage their superpower. Just as fluency acts as a bridging process for monolingual students, it’s vital for MLLs. These superheroes need a lot of practice and feedback to effortlessly decode grade-level texts in English and devote their attention to comprehension. Instruction in fluency helps MLLs develop English oral language skills such as phrasing, intonation, and vocabulary. In turn, MLLs are better prepared to comprehend in English when they can decode fluently.

In addition to explicit, systematic literacy instruction, there are a variety of collaborative, effective practices that grow fluent readers, including MLLs. For example:

• Choral Reading: students in the whole class, small groups, or pairs of students read aloud simultaneously
• Echo Reading: an I Do – You Do strategy, where students listen to a reader and follow along in a text before they echo what they heard
• Audio-Assisted Reading: students read along and track the text while listening to an audio version
• Repeated Reading: students reread aloud the same text
• Phrased Reading: a chunking strategy where students read words in meaningful phrases
• Readers’ Theater: students perform by reading aloud lines in a text

All of these fluency practices help students develop into fluent readers. However, if we combine them all into an integrated fluency lesson, then we get an outcome that is greater than its individual components. This synergy is the Fluency Development Lesson (FDL) (Rasinski, Padak, Linek, & Sturtevant, 1994).

The Fluency Development Lesson—A Superpower Boost

Let’s think again about Zan and Jayna, my favorite superheroes from childhood. Or think about your own favorite superhero. Every superhero has a specific superpower, right? Does that superpower work on its own all the time? Likely not! For Zan and Jayna, they often needed some additional support to save the day.

As superheroes, Multilingual Learners are no different. Sometimes they need a boost to increase their reading fluency, which in turn fuels their multilingualism/multiliteracy. One of these boosts is the FDL, an evidence-based instructional routine proven to improve foundational reading skills and comprehension for all students, including MLLs (National Reading Panel, 2000; Kulich 2009; Zimmerman, et al., 2019).

FDL Components

The FDL is composed of evidence-based fluency practices like repeated, choral, and echo reading, and students reread the same text while the teacher scaffolds support.

Designed to be implemented in 15–20 minutes over the course of 5 days, the FDL targets fluency skills while incorporating pre- and postreading activities to support all foundational reading skills, such as phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition, the FDL includes written response activities because reading and writing are synergistic. The combination of word study, writing, and comprehension discussions packed into the FDL make it a powerful, explicit literacy practice.

How Does the FDL Support MLLs?

MLLs need scaffolded access to grade-level texts, and the FDL answers this call. While any genre will do, poetry, with its ebb and flow of rhythmic language, is a great choice. MLLs benefit from the rhythm, rhyme, and repetition that poetry naturally provides, (Vardell, Hadaway, & Young, 2006). In addition, here are four specific ways the FDL supports MLLs:

1. Comprehensible Input
   When working with MLLs, determine how to make the language and text structures comprehensible. They may not understand every word in a text, but if they can rely on linguistic and contextual cues, then the text becomes easier to understand. The FDL includes explicit vocabulary and comprehension instruction and discussions about the author’s or poet’s purpose. Preplanning and prereading activities provide comprehensible input.
2. Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening
   The FDL, with its multiple and strategic activities, targets all literacy domains. In a 15–20-minute lesson, MLLs get a comprehensive literacy boost. They read a poem, engage in dialogic conversations, and put their thoughts in writing.
3. Constructive Feedback and Motivation
   Just as MLLs need real-time support, they need real-time feedback to make necessary adjustments to ensure they comprehend. When reading aloud, educators provide feedback, and MLLs are encouraged to engage and persist. The repeated readings, which are part of the FDL, motivate students and foster fluency and comprehension.
4. Scaffolded Practice
   The choral, echo, and repeated reading activities that are part of the FDL provide MLLs with opportunities to read the poem with verifying degrees of support. Like learning to ride a bike, the training wheels serve a purpose until they’re no longer needed.

Get Started Today

Remember, MLLs are superheroes because they can leverage skills acquired in one language to facilitate learning a new language. Their native language is a superpower, not a hinderance. Build on their cultural, linguistic, and educational experiences, and fuel these assets with fluency instruction.

Are you eager to learn more about the FDL and how you can provide MLLs access to rich, complex texts? Check out the book The Fluency Development Lesson: Closing the Reading Gap for poems and lessons created with wonder-twin powers in mind.