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RS2 Mister Mole's Stove Book Compiled 2.2020

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RS2 Mister Mole Foundational Skills Guide

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RS1 Just a Box Foundational Skills Guide

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ER 30 Stink Bug Foundational Skills Guide

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ER 6 Pam Likes to Nap Book Compiled 2.2020

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ER 6 Pam Likes to Nap Foundational Skills Guide

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Instructional Settings, Levels of Texts, and Classroom Application

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ER 11 To the Top Foundational Skills Guide

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9_5_Prompting students to apply word-reading strategies (3)

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Monitoring Reading Fluency English-Spanish (1)

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Measuring Reading Accuracy and Fluency Levels (1)

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Explicitly Teach High Frequency Words (1)

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Prompting Students to Apply Word-Reading Strategies (1)

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Handout_FCRR_High Frequency Word Practice Student Activities

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9_5_Prompting students to apply word-reading strategies (1)

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Fluency - A Closer Look at Reading Levels

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Handout _Fluency Instruction Considerations for ELs-1

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Handout Best Practices for Promoting Prosody

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Best Practice for Promoting Rate and Automaticity

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Prompts to Help Students Notice and Fix Errors

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Prompting Students to Apply Word-Reading Strategies

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9_2_Reading Fluency Does Not Mean Reading Fast

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9_1_High Frequency Phrase Fluency Charts

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Language Arts

This planning checklist for a choral reading lesson uses the poem "One Sister for Sale" by Shel Silverstein. See example ›

This PDF includes dozens of poems for shared, choral, paired, and echo reading. See example ›

The website below offers teachers several poetry options conducive to the Choral Reading strategy along with some interesting tips on reading and language development. See example ›

The example of choral reading found on this site uses the children's book James and the Giant Peach. See example ›

Science

This lesson plan includes examples of choral reading activities that correspond to introductory science concepts. See example ›

Social Studies

This website includes a script for the choral reading of the children's book Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain. See example ›

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Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students. Choral reading helps build students' fluency, self-confidence, and motivation. Because students are reading aloud together, students who may ordinarily feel self-conscious or nervous about reading aloud have built-in support.

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It helps students work together.

It encourages cooperation and supports peer-assisted learning.

How to use paired reading

How to pair students

Pair students either by same reading ability or by high level readers with low level readers. Use the following steps to pair high-level readers with low-level readers:

List the students in order from highest to lowest according to reading ability

Divide the list in half

Place the top student in the first list with the top student in the second list

Continue until all students have been partnered

Be sensitive to pairings of students with special needs, including learning or emotional needs. Adjust pairings as necessary

The reader from the first list should read first while the reader from the second list listens and follows along

The second reader should pick up where the first reader stops. If additional practice is needed, the second reader can reread what the first reader read

Encourage pairs to ask each other about what was read. "What was your page about? What was your favorite part?"

Implementing the strategy

1. Introduce the students to the Paired Reading strategy. This includes:

Establishing a routine for students to adopt so that they know the step-by-step requirements for engaging in paired reading (i.e. Will they read out loud, simultaneously? Will they take turns with each person reading a paragraph? a page? Or will one person read while the other person listens?).

Teaching students an error-correction procedure to use when supporting each other's reading (i.e. re-reading misread words; signals for difficulty).

Modeling the procedure to ensure that students understand how to use the strategy.

2. Ask students to begin reading in pairs and adjust reading speed if reading simultaneously so they stay together.

3. Have students offer feedback and praise frequently for correct reading.

4. Monitor and support students as they work.

See Strategies to Build Reading Fluency to learn more.

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Paired (or Partner) Reading | Classroom Strategy | Reading Rockets

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Paired reading is a research-based fluency strategy used with readers who lack fluency. In this strategy, students read aloud to each other. When using partners, more fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers, or children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a story they have already read.

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Council for Exceptional Children, the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD) and the Division for Research (DR). Fluency Instruction.

Dowhower, S. (1989) Repeated reading: Research into practice. The Reading Teacher, 42(7), 502-507.

Hudson, R.F., Lane, H.B., & Pullen, P.C. (2005). Reading Fluency Assessment and Instruction: What, Why, and How?. The Reading Teacher, 58(8), 702-714.

Johns, J. & Berglund, R. (2002). Fluency: Question, answers, evidence-based strategies. Dubuque, IO: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.

Kuhn, M. (2004). Helping students become accurate, expressive readers: Fluency instruction for small groups. The Reading Teacher, 58(4), 338-344.

Lee, J., & Yoon, S. Y. (2017). The Effects of Repeated Reading on Reading Fluency for Students With Reading Disabilities: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50(2), 213-224. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219415605194

Murray, B. (1999). Two Methods for Developing Fluency.

Rasinski, T. (2003) The fluent reader: Oral reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension. New York, NY: Scholastic Professional Books.

Samuels, S. J. (2002). Reading fluency: It's development and assessment. In Farstrup, A. & Samuels, S. (Ed.). What research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 166-183). Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association.

Samuels, S. J. (1997). The method of repeated readings. The Reading Teacher, 50(5), 376-381.

Therrien, W. J. (2004). Fluency and Comprehension Gains as a Result of Repeated Reading: A Meta-Analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 25(4), 252-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/07419325040250040801

Vaca, R. & Vaca, J. (1999). Content area reading: Literacy and learning across the curriculum, 6th edition. New York, NY: Logman.

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Timed repeated readings are an instructional practice for monitoring students' fluency development. Repeated readings, under timed conditions, of familiar instructional level text can increase students' reading speed which can improve comprehension.

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Fluency Practice with Jenga.

Photograph by Allison Robbins Elkow.

Phrases and Short Sentences for Repeated Reading Practice,
First 100 Words produced by Timothy Rasinski.

"One of the most visible features of fluent readers is their ability to read orally with appropriate expression or prosody. Features of prosodic oral reading include intonation, stress, phrasing, appropriate pausing, and phrase lengthening. (Dowhower, 1987, 1991; Schrauben, 2010; Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Kuhn, Wisenbaker an Stahl, 2004.)"

My previous blog dealt briefly with factors that affect fluency (such as Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), reading experience, and understanding) and prosody. I also defined each of these terms. The focus of this blog will be prosody, and it will include activities and ideas that promote this skill.

In addition to the features of prosodic oral reading mentioned above, I'dlike to revisit the working definition given in a short video I included in my last blog.

Prosody is, "the use of pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm in speech, so the listener can understand what is being said."

So how do we teach prosody to a student?

Well, we can start by modeling fluent reading. I often do this after a student has read a passage to me, if I feel we need to work on prosody. I model it, and talk about what I'm doing and why. I then ask them to read the passage again, now that they are familiar with it, but this time I ask them to focus on reading it so the listener can understand what is being said. A fluency rubic may be useful here, to help you monitor a student's expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace. This can help you determine if and where a student might require help.

Choral and echo reading are also great for developing prosody. Choral reading is reading aloud with others, such as a group of children, or a whole class. Choral reading was an activity that was very popular when I started my teaching career in the UK in the late 1980's, and children would often perform choral reading pieces. The short video, included with this link, demonstrates choral reading with a small group of students, and also includes suggestions for appropriate books and ways to develop choral reading. During echo reading, a teacher reads a sentence or short paragraph and the student echoes it back. This link includes two short videos demonstrating echo reading.

Fluency phrases are incredibly important. The Connect to Comprehension program developed by Lynn Givens, which is available through the Orton-Gillingham Online Academy, includes lots of fluency phrases, along with other exercises to develop a student's fluency. I have used phrases from the Great Leaps fluency programs and from the Phonic Books workbooks. Timothy Rasinski has made available these phrases and short sentences for repeated reading practice, based on the Fry Instant Word List.

If a student repeats the reading of a few phrases each week, they are practicing reading high frequency words, while at the same time they are developing fluency and proficiency in reading. The full list of 300 words contains about two-thirds of all the words a student will encounter in their reading. Tim Rasinski has also made a further list available, so there is no shortage of phrases to use.He suggests that the phrases can be written on sentence strips, or a chart, or you could even create Jenga fluency phrases as Allison Robbins Elkow has done in the image above.

Creating and using phrase-cued text has been shown to be helpful for all readers. To explain why, I'd like to quote from Building Fluency Through The Phrased Text Lesson by Timothy Rasinski, Kasim Yildrim, and James Nageldinger.

"We feel that the phrase, in and of itself, is a textual unit worthy of explicit instruction. In many ways, it is the phrase and not the word that is the essential unit of meaning in a text"

Phrasing difficulties can disrupt meaning, but phrase boundaries can be difficult for students to detect. Punctuation offers help, but readers still have to infer the appropriate places to phrase text within sentences. For readers who are already struggling, this may be just too complex and challenging. Instruction in this area, especially for students struggling with fluency, is very worthwhile. The article, Building Fluency Through The Phrased Text Lesson, as well as providing a scientific basis for this technique, also describes these lessons in great detail.

In addition to helping students with phrase boundaries, these lessons include the other elements of effective fluency instruction that I've mentioned, such as modeling fluent reading, and choral reading. These lessons help develop syntactic awareness in students, as they learn the correct ordering of words and phrases in sentences.

While researching this blog, I came across a Phrase-Cue Text Generator to help teachers, tutors, and parents to train their student or child to recognize the natural pauses that occur between phrases in their reading.

In conclusion, I will quote from the article, "Building Fluency Through The Phrased Text Lesson."

"Fluency is more than reading words in a text accurately and automatically; it is also reading the words in texts with appropriate phrasing and expression that reflects and amplifies the meaning of the passage. The phrased text lesson is one approach to helping students gain proficiency in this often neglected area of fluency."

I will close with an apt quotation from Lynn Givens:

"I think it's also critical that teachers, parents, and students understand that "reading fast" is not the same as "reading well."

I would like to thank Lynn Givens for ideas and guidance as I wrote this blog.

I would also like to thank Allison Robbins for allowing me to use her photograph, "Fluency Practice with Jenga."

Further Reading and Sources:

1. Reading Rockets-Choral Reading http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/choral_reading

2. Strategies: Echo Reading. https://strategiesforspecialinterventions.weebly.com/echo-reading.html

3. Building Fluency Through The Phrased Text Lesson by Timothy Rasinski, Kasim Yildrim, and James Nageldinger.

Lorna Wooldridge is a dyslexia specialist tutor with over twenty-five years of experience and qualifications in the field of learning differences, from both the UK and USA. Lorna has a unique perspective on this condition as she has dyslexia, and her passion is to serve this community in any way she can.

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The Big Five: Fluency and Prosody Part 15

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Fluency Practice with Jenga. Photograph by Allison Robbins Elkow. Phrases and Short Sentences for Repeated Reading Practice, First 100 Words produced by Timothy Rasinski. "One of the most visible features of fluent readers is their ability to read orally with appropriate express

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What should fluency instruction look like? And, what can teachers do to help students whose fluency is far behind their peers'? This article can help practitioners effectively use fluency-based assessments and select instructional practices.

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Guidelines for instruction

Provide children with opportunities to read and reread a range of stories and informational texts by reading on their own, partner reading, or choral reading.

Introduce new or difficult words to children, and provide practice reading these words before they read on their own.

Include opportunities for children to hear a range of texts read fluently and with expression.

Suggest ideas for building home-school connections that encourage families to become involved actively in children's reading development.

Encourage periodic timing of children's oral reading and recording of information about individual children's reading rate and accuracy.

Model fluent reading, then have students reread the text on their own.

What students should read

Fluency develops as a result of many opportunities to practice reading with a high degree of success. Therefore, your students should practice rereading aloud texts that are reasonably easy for them – that is, texts containing mostly words that they know or can decode easily. In other words, the texts should be at the students' independent reading level.

A text is at students' independent reading level if they can read it with about 95% accuracy. If the text is more difficult, students will focus on word recognition and will not have an opportunity to develop fluency.

The text your students practice rereading orally should also be relatively short – probably 50-200 words, depending on the age of the students. You should also use a variety of reading materials, including stories, nonfiction, and poetry. Poetry is especially well suited to fluency practice because poems for children are often short and they contain rhythm, rhyme, and meaning, making practice easy, fun, and rewarding.

Model fluent reading

By listening to good models of fluent reading, students learn how a reader's voice can help written text make sense. Read aloud daily to your students. By reading effortlessly and with expression, you are modeling for your students how a fluent reader sounds during reading.

Repeated reading

After you model how to read the text, you must have the students reread it. By doing this, the students are engaging in repeated reading. Usually, having students read a text four times is sufficient to improve fluency. Remember, however, that instructional time is limited, and it is the actual time that students are actively engaged in reading that produces reading gains.

Have other adults read aloud to students. Encourage parents or other family members to read aloud to their children at home. The more models of fluent reading the children hear, the better. Of course, hearing a model of fluent reading is not the only benefit of reading aloud to children. Reading to children also increases their knowledge of the world, their vocabulary, their familiarity with written language ("book language"), and their interest in reading.

Activities for students to increase fluency

There are several ways that your students can practice orally rereading text, including student-adult reading, choral (or unison) reading, tape-assisted reading, partner reading, and readers' theatre.

Student-adult reading

In student-adult reading, the student reads one-on-one with an adult. The adult can be you, a parent, a classroom aide, or a tutor. The adult reads the text first, providing the students with a model of fluent reading. Then the student reads the same passage to the adult with the adult providing assistance and encouragement. The student rereads the passage until the reading is quite fluent. This should take approximately three to four rereadings.

Choral reading

In choral, or unison, reading, students read along as a group with you (or another fluent adult reader). Of course, to do so, students must be able to see the same text that you are reading. They might follow along as you read from a big book, or they might read from their own copy of the book you are reading. For choral reading, choose a book that is not too long and that you think is at the independent reading level of most students. Patterned or predictable books are particularly useful for choral reading, because their repetitious style invites students to join in. Begin by reading the book aloud as you model fluent reading.

Then reread the book and invite students to join in as they recognize the words you are reading. Continue rereading the book, encouraging students to read along as they are able. Students should read the book with you three to five times total (though not necessarily on the same day). At this time, students should be able to read the text independently.

Tape-assisted reading

In tape-assisted reading, students read along in their books as they hear a fluent reader read the book on an audiotape. For tape-assisted reading, you need a book at a student's independent reading level and a tape recording of the book read by a fluent reader at about 80-100 words per minute. The tape should not have sound effects or music. For the first reading, the student should follow along with the tape, pointing to each word in her or his book as the reader reads it. Next, the student should try to read aloud along with the tape. Reading along with the tape should continue until the student is able to read the book independently, without the support of the tape.

Partner reading

In partner reading, paired students take turns reading aloud to each other. For partner reading, more fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers. The stronger reader reads a paragraph or page first, providing a model of fluent reading. Then the less fluent reader reads the same text aloud. The stronger student gives help with word recognition and provides feedback and encouragement to the less fluent partner. The less fluent partner rereads the passage until he or she can read it independently. Partner reading need not be done with a more and less fluent reader. In another form of partner reading, children who read at the same level are paired to reread a story that they have received instruction on during a teacher-guided part of the lesson. Two readers of equal ability can practice rereading after hearing the teacher read the passage.

Readers' theatre

In readers' theatre, students rehearse and perform a play for peers or others. They read from scripts that have been derived from books that are rich in dialogue. Students play characters who speak lines or a narrator who shares necessary background information. Readers' theatre provides readers with a legitimate reason to reread text and to practice fluency. Readers' theatre also promotes cooperative interaction with peers and makes the reading task appealing.

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Fluency: Instructional Guidelines and Student Activities

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The best strategy for developing reading fluency is to provide your students with many opportunities to read the same passage orally several times. To do this, you should first know what to have your students read. Second, you should know how to have your students read aloud repeatedly.

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Reading Fluency is more than Automaticity

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Reading Fluency is more than Automaticity

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Applegate Modla Applegate She's My Best Reader

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"Fluency, the ability to read a text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression..." "Fluent readers can read text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression..."
My dismay is due to (a) listing rate first in both statements, and (b) using "quickly" and "with speed" rather than "rate" (or "appropriate rate" as in the CCSS fluency standard). I wonder if this wording may have encouraged folks who now embrace the notion that "faster is better" (e.g. "better readers have higher DIBELS scores - wcpm")

In my own work I often refer to Stahl & Kuhn (2002) who stated that "fluent reading sounds like speech" - smooth, effortless, but not "as fast as you can."

Well, first off, let me take full responsibility for the wordings that you found troubling. I took the lead in writing that portion of the report, and so I probably wrote it that way.

Nevertheless, I doubt that my inapt wording was what triggered the all too prevalent emphasis on speed over everything else in fluency; that I'd pin on misinterpretations of DIBELS.

I, too, have seen teachers guiding kids to read as fast as they can, trying to inflate DIBELS scores in meaningless ways. What a waste of time.

But, that said, the importance of speed/quickness/rate in fluency cannot be overstated - though it obviously can be misunderstood.

The fundamental idea that I was expressing in those quotes was that students must get to the point where they can recognize/decode words with enough facility that they will be able to read the author's words with something like the speed and prosody of language.

Old measures of fluency - like informal reading inventories - looked at accuracy alone, which is only adequate with beginning readers. The problem with accuracy measures is that they overrate the plodders who can slowly and laboriously get the words right (as if they were reading a meaningless list of random words).

DIBELS was an important advance over that because it included rate and accuracy - which is sufficient in the primary grades, but which overrates the hurried readers who can speed through texts without appropriate expression. Studies are showing that prosody is not particularly discriminating in the earlier grades, but as kids progress it gains in importance (probably because the syntax gets more complex and prosody or expression is an indicator of how well kids are sorting that out - rather than just decoding quickly enough to allow comprehension).

Fluency instruction and monitoring are very important, and I agree with your complaint that it is often poorly taught and mis-assessed by teachers. I think there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, I think many teachers don't have a clear fluency concept-and stating its components (accuracy, rate, and prosody) - in their order of development won't fix that. Fluency is not a distinct skill as much as it is an amalgam of skills. It is part decoding, part comprehension.

Kids cannot read if they can't decode and recognize words; translating from print to pronunciation. That's why we teach things like sight words, phonological awareness, and phonics.

However, recognizing words in a list is a very different task than reading them horizontally, organized into sentences, with all the distraction that implies. Speed (or rate or quickness) don't really matter when reading a list of words. But when reading sentences, it is critical that you move it along. Slow word reading indicates that a student is devoting a lot of cognitive resources to figuring out the words, and that means cognitive resources will not be available to thinking about the ideas. That's why speed of word reading is so important; it is an indicator of how much a reader will be able to focus on a text's meaning.

But fluency is not just fast word reading. It includes some aspects of reading comprehension, too. For instance, fluent readers tend to pronounce homographs (heteronyms) - desert, affect, intimate - correctly without needing to slow down or try alternatives. Fluent readers may have no advantage in thinking deeply about the ideas in a text, but they do when it comes to this kind of immediate interpretation while reading.

Another aspect of comprehension that is part of fluency is the ability to parse sentences so that they sound like sentences. Someone listening to your oral reading should be able to understand the message, because you would have grouped the words appropriately into phrases and clauses. To read in that way, you, again, have to be quickly interpreting the sentences-using punctuation and meaning as you go.

Teachers who think that fluency is just reading the right words, or just reading the right words really fast, is missing the point. Stahl and Kuhn are right: fluency has to go, not necessarily fast, but the speed of normal language.

Second, I think many teachers don't understand assessment. Reading assessments of all kinds try to estimate student performance based on small samples of behavior. Accordingly, the assessment tasks usually differ from the overall behavior in important ways.

With fluency, that means measuring some aspects of the concept, e.g., speed and accuracy, while not measuring others, e.g., prosody.

Given the imperfect nature of these predictor tasks, it is foolish, and even damaging, to teach the tasks rather than the ability we are trying to estimate. It is like teaching kids to answer multiple-choice questions rather than teaching them to think about the ideas in text.

As long as teachers try to teach facets of tests rather than reading we're going to see this kind of problem. The following guidance might help.

1. Tell students to read the text aloud as well as they can - not as fast as they can.

2. Tell them that they will be expected to answer questions about the text when they finish - so they will read while trying to understand the text.

3. Pay attention not just to the wcpm (words correct per minute), but to whether the reading sounds like language.

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Oral Reading Fluency Is More than Speed | Reading Rockets

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Letter to Shanahan: I found these troubling quotes in the Report of the National Reading Panel: "Fluency, the ability to read a text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression..." "Fluent readers can read text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression..."

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Abstract

The goals of this study were to (a) develop an empirically based model regarding the development of fluent and automatic reading in the early elementary school years and (b) determine whether fluent text-reading skills provided benefits for reading comprehension beyond those accounted for by fluent word decoding. First-, second-, and third-grade children completed a series of reading tasks targeting word and nonword processing, text reading, spelling knowledge, autonomous reading, and reading comprehension. Structural equation modeling was carried out to evaluate how these skills operated together to produce fluent text reading and good comprehension. Evidence supported a simple reading fluency model for the early elementary school years suggesting that fluent word and text reading operate together with autonomous reading to produce good comprehension.

The development of fluent and automatic reading skills is considered a primary educational goal for elementary school-age children. Although there is no single definition of reading fluency, there is general agreement that fluent reading incorporates the ability to read quickly, accurately, and, when oral reading is considered, with expression ( National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000). In fact, a recent study indicates that second- and third-grade children who read quickly and accurately also tend to read with expression, suggesting that this definition of reading fluency is quite appropriate ( Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Kuhn, Wisenbaker, & Stahl, 2004). In general, fluent reading emerges in most children between first and third grade, when decoding skills are confirmed through practice ( Kuhn & Stahl, 2003). Reading fluency, as measured either by quick and accurate word reading or by text-reading rate, continues to develop beyond this period ( Hasbrouck & Tindal, 1992; Horn & Manis, 1987).

The development of reading fluency is viewed as important because of its relationship with improved comprehension ( Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). LaBerge and Samuels's (1974) now-classic article presenting an automaticity theory of reading argued that proficient word-recognition skills underlie fluent reading and adequate comprehension of text. According to the model, fluent readers are characterized by the ability to read quickly and without conscious effort ( Logan, 1997). Dysfluent beginning readers, by contrast, are identified by their excessively slow, laborious reading, which, in turn, impairs comprehension.

Automaticity is an important component of skilled reading. Whether considered in terms of reading or any other skill, automaticity is identified by a number of characteristics, some of which concern us here. The first of these are speed and accuracy, which seem to emerge simultaneously with practice ( Logan, 1988). Practice strengthens connections between word and letter patterns in long-term memory (e.g., LaBerge & Samuels, 1974), unitizes these letter patterns in memory so that they can be processed as whole units ( Anderson, 1987), and proliferates the availability of instances of these word and letter unit representations in long-term memory with every encounter of them during reading ( Logan, 1997).

Another characteristic of automatic skill is autonomy, or the ability to initiate a task without actively attending to it. The automatic reader cannot help but process print, even when he or she may intend to avoid doing so. Skilled readers find themselves reading the conflicting "crawl" at the bottom of a television news story, even when they try to pay attention to the main story ( Bergen, Grimes, & Potter, 2005). However, the automatic nature of skilled word recognition is usually helpful because it orients our attention to the reading. Occasionally, as noted above, this can get in the way of our goals. Experimentally, the autonomous nature of automatic word reading has been measured through the use of the Stroop task ( Stroop, 1935) and its variants. In the Stroop task, the reader is typically asked to name a picture or color without reading distracting words that are embedded. Autonomy is indicated by the interference that the distracting print causes to the picture or color naming. Thus, a child who is an automatic reader will be slowed in the naming a picture of an apple with the word doll written on it compared with naming a picture without the distracting print.

Finally, automaticity allows cognitive resources to be used to benefit larger goals. For reading, as automaticity develops for skills like word recognition, attentional resources become available for comprehension. Thus, children move from relying on the slow letter-by-letter (or unit-by-unit) decoding to painlessly retrieving cued words from long-term memory ( Logan, 1997). This means that children who have efficient word-recognition skills should be able to read connected text fluently and better understand what they read.

The three aspects of automaticity (speed, autonomy, and resource use) are thought to develop concomitantly with one another, but how closely their development coincides is uncertain ( Logan, 1985; Paap & Ogden, 1981). Clearly, at the very beginning of skill development, word reading is extremely slow, very effortful, and resource intensive (i.e., requiring a great deal of attention). Once a child has attained a high level of skill, word and text reading is very quick, occurs without intention, and ensures that plenty of resources are left available for comprehension. In the middle of skill development, it is unclear how the autonomy feature of automaticity relates to speed and resource aspects. Thus, it is uncertain whether the extent to which young readers experience Stroop interference, for example, is relative to their reading fluency or to improved comprehension.

How quickly automaticity develops depends on the underlying mechanisms and how they may work. For example, in some views, this buildup to automatic processing is seen as slow and laborious, occurring over hundreds of decoding attempts ( Schneider, Dumais, & Shiffrin, 1984), whereas in others automaticity can develop after correctly recognizing a word only once or twice ( Logan, 1997; Logan & Klapp, 1991). If the latter is true, then Stroop interference should develop quickly as children develop the ability to read. Moreover, the benefits for reading fluency and comprehension might emerge even for very young readers whose word recognition during reading is better than that of their peers. Despite the popularity of this automaticity account of the development of reading skill, model building to assess how these aspects of automaticity in early reading operate together is rare.

The purposes of the current study were two. First, we wished to provide a more comprehensive account regarding how fluency, autonomy, and freed resources (in terms of improved comprehension) operate together in early reading skill development. Thus, children completed reading tasks targeted at each aspect of automaticity, and the interrelationships among them were examined.

Second, we wished to determine the relative adequacy of two potential variants of this automaticity view of reading fluency, depicted in Figures 1a and 1b . In one view, which we call the text reading as mediator model, text-reading fluency is seen as uniquely relevant for comprehension ( Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003) in contrast with other indicators of reading fluency. Young readers may or may not execute a variety of cognitive processes relevant to the comprehension of text if they have the cognitive resources available to generate them, such as inferencing to fill in the gaps in the text, creating a mental model of the world described by the text, and processing sentence grammar. At minimum, additional cognitive resource benefits may derive from fluent text reading through the contextual activation of word meanings ( Stanovich, 1980) and the automatic linguistic segmentation of text into major syntactic units ( Young & Bowers, 1995). This view is supported by studies showing that the fluent reading of text accounts for additional variance in reading comprehension beyond that accounted for by isolated word reading alone ( Jenkins et al., 2003). In Figure 1a , this partial mediating effect of text reading is shown by the indirect path leading from GORT-3 Text-Reading Rate and to WIAT Reading Comprehension.

Another view, which we call the simple reading fluency model, states that reading fluency is a general skill that includes skills related to word-reading fluency as well as those related to text-reading fluency. In this model, it is assumed that, early in the development of reading skills, word-recognition skills are the limiting factor in reading comprehension and that the cognitive resources gained from automaticity derive mainly from quick and accurate word reading. Moreover, the skills that allow children to coordinate the benefits from fluent word and text reading may not yet be fully developed. This view is supported by studies showing that reading skill in young elementary school readers can be described as a single factor consisting of word-recognition skill, text-reading fluency, and reading comprehension ( Shinn, Good, Knutson, Tilly, & Collins, 1992). Further, the texts that children read increase in complexity as they proceed in school. These changes in complexity may include, among others, greater syntactic complexity ( Harber, 1979) and fewer repetitions of specific words within texts ( Hiebert & Fisher, 2005). If text complexity increases faster than children's text fluency resources can be expended to capitalize on it, children may not experience the benefits gained from fluent text reading to support increases in comprehension during the early stages of fluent reading. Thus, children's word-recognition skills may need to become yet more automatic to manage these more complex text features given the resources children have available. In Figure 1b , this general influence of word-reading fluency is illustrated by showing GORT-3 Text-Reading Rate as merely another indicator of the latent variable Reading Fluency.

In what follows, we describe our rationale for including specific tasks and assessments as indicators of model features in tests of these larger models. We begin with our discussion of tasks and assessments that should be most closely related to reading fluency per se. Then, we describe research on tasks designed to assess the autonomy component and our assessment of reading comprehension.

Reading fluency component

Word-reading fluency

It is often asserted that the development of efficient word-recognition skills is the sine qua non of skilled reading in the early stages of learning to read ( Adams, 1990; Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003; NICHD, 2000; Olson, Gillis, Rack, DeFries, & Fulker, 1991; Stanovich, 1985; Stanovich, Nathan, & Vala-Rossi, 1986; Stanovich, Nathan, & Zolman, 1988). It is the core skill around which reading fluency is built and an important skill for predicting reading comprehension ( Gough, 1996; Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). It distinguishes skilled from less skilled readers in a manner that is remarkably stable from first to fourth grade ( Juel, 1988). It is often considered one, if not the key, bottleneck on the way to good reading comprehension ( LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Lyon, 1995; Nicholson, 1999; Perfetti, 1985).

A number of word features seem to enter into the skilled reading of words in young children. High-frequency words tend to be named faster than low-frequency words ( Gottardo, Chiappe, Siegel, & Stanovich, 1999; Waters, Seidenberg, & Bruck, 1984). Orthographically irregular words (words whose spellings do not follow typical letter-sound correspondences) tend to be read more slowly and inaccurately than orthographically regular words in young readers ( Backman, Bruck, Hebert, & Seidenberg, 1984; Nation & Snowling, 1998; Waters et al., 1984). Semantically difficult words (words rated low in imageability; Laing & Hulme, 1999; Nation & Snowling; Schwanenflugel & Akin, 1994; or rated context availability; McFalls, Schwanenflugel, & Stahl, 1996; Schwanenflugel & Noyes, 1996) are read more slowly and inaccurately than semantically easy words in young readers.

In the current study, we assessed children's word-reading fluency in two ways. First, we assessed children's automaticity for sight words using the Sight Word Efficiency subtest of the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TORP; 1999), a speeded sight-word-reading test. Second, we assessed children's speed of processing for a potentially wider range of word types by presenting them with a mixed variety of words in a timed computerized single-word-naming task.

Nonword reading

Nonword reading is often used as an indicator of children's understanding of the relationships between letters, letter strings, and larger units such as rime units and speech sounds ( Coltheart & Leahy, 1992; Treiman, Goswami, & Bruck, 1990). Nonword reading is used as a way of assessing children's ability to read unfamiliar words ( Gottardo et al., 1999; Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992). Nonword-reading speed is widely considered an indicator of the automaticity of essential phonics and blending skills and is usually highly correlated with word-recognition skills ( Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1999). In the current study, we assessed children's nonword-reading skills using the Phonemic Decoding Efficiency subtest from the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Torgesen et al.), a speeded nonword-naming task.

Rapid object naming

Assessment of rapid object naming involves measuring how rapidly a child can carry out rapid naming of series of pictures. Although not obviously related to reading fluency, the speed with which children can carry out the rapid naming of pictures, as well as numbers, letters, and colors, has been shown to be associated with the development of reading skill in general ( Manis, Seidenberg, & Doi, 1999; Morris et al., 1998; Scarborough, 1998; Wolf, Bally, & Morris, 1986; Wolf & Bowers, 1999) and potentially involved in the orchestration of processes involved in reading fluency ( Wolf, Bowers, & Biddle, 2000). Rapid object-naming speed shares considerable independent variance with word identification ( Bowers & Swanson, 1991). For the purposes of the present study, naming-speed deficits have also been shown to affect the rate with which individuals are able to read connected text ( Bowers, 1993; Breznitz & Berman, 2003; Katzir, Shaul, Breznitz, & Wolf, 2004; Stage, Sheppard, Davidson, & Browning, 2001; Young & Bowers, 1995) and so may have particular implications for the development of reading fluency. Thus, in the development of reading, naming-speed problems result in the "slower access to lexical and sublexical information that may impede the development of fluency in reading" ( Wolf et al., 2000, p. 401).

Orthographic processing

Orthographic processing can be defined as "the ability to represent the unique array of letters that defines a printed word, as well as general attributes of the writing system such as sequential dependencies, structural redundancies, and letter position frequencies" ( Vellutino, Scanlon, & Tanzman, 1994, p. 314). Orthographic coding tasks are designed to assess children's knowledge of visual spelling patterns in a way that distinguishes them from the simple retrieval of letter sounds. Orthographic processing differences among children may account for additional variance in word-reading skill independent of that accounted for by phonological processing, such as nonword reading ( Cunningham & Stanovich, 1990), but this is not always found ( Manis, Custodio, & Szeszulski, 1993). Low-skilled readers may use this knowledge of visual spelling patterns to compensate for otherwise poor phonics skills as an alternative route to word identification ( Pennington, Lefly, Van Orden, Bookman, & Smith, 1987; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994), but this point is also controversial (see Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, & Lynn, 1996).

In the current study, we assessed orthographic knowledge in two ways. First, we used the Experimental Spelling Task, developed by Olson, Kliegl, Davidson, and Foltz (1985), to assess children's orthographic processing. In this task, children are asked to decide which of two letter strings represents the correct spelling of a real word, such as rane versus rain. Because both strings obey the spelling-sound correspondences of English and both sound like a real English word when sounded out, children must retrieve orthographic information to discriminate between them. Variants of this basic task have been used by a number of researchers to measure orthographic knowledge ( Manis et al., 1993; Olson et al., 1985; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994). Some researchers (Manis et al.; Vellutino et al., 1994) have taken issue with this means of assessing orthographic knowledge because it is possible for children to make these decisions on the basis of their prior experience reading the words, their spelling instruction, or the mere presence of more orthographic "neighbors" (i.e., rain, vain, stain, grain, brain) in their mental lexicon for one option over the other. Still, it is probably the most widely used task to assess orthographic knowledge, so we included it in our study.

Second, we used a variant of the Doublet Knowledge Test, developed by Cassar and Treiman (1997), to assess metacognitive knowledge of doublets. This task assesses children's understanding of the permissibility of consonants and vowels as doublets with regard to position (i.e., consonant doublets tend not to occur at the beginning of a word with a rare exceptions such as llama) and letter (i.e., ii and uu cannot appear as doublets within a word; some consonants such as hh, jj, and vv are rarely doubled). This task may also have some of the problems of Experimental Spelling Task (i.e., neighborhood effects) but seems to relate less ambiguously to true orthographic knowledge. In our variant of this task, participants were asked to decide as quickly as possible which of two items such as baff versus bbaf "looks more like a word should look." Cassar and Treiman found that this type of knowledge emerges in kindergarten and is fully accurate by second grade. In our variant of this task, we presented children with the doublet task and asked them to make the doublet decision as quickly as they could.

Text-reading fluency

Typically, assessments of text-reading fluency entail asking children to read aloud from connected text while an examiner records, at minimum, the number of correctly read words per minute. At issue is exactly what additional benefit text-reading fluency provides beyond those accrued from skilled, fluent word recognition.

There are a number of potential benefits that the fluent reading of connected text can provide over reading isolated words. Among them, fluent oral readers verbally segment word strings into larger syntactic groupings that may support comprehension ( Dowhower, 1987; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; Rasinski, 1990; Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001; Young & Bowers, 1995). Text reading makes available context-facilitated word recognition as well ( Stanovich, 1980). To the extent that these processes are carried out automatically, children can gain additional resource benefits from text reading that they can use for comprehension. The point of view represented by this model is supported by studies finding that text-reading fluency accounts for additional variance in reading comprehension beyond that accounted for by word-reading fluency alone ( Jenkins et al., 2003). However, whether children in the early phases of learning to read are able to make use of the resource benefits ascribed to text-level reading is controversial ( Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004; Shinn et al., 1992). In the current study, to assess text-reading fluency, children read passages from the Gray Oral Reading Test-Third Edition (GORT-3). This assessment is perhaps the most widely used standardized assessment of reading fluency ( Marlow & Edwards, 1998).

The autonomy component

The Stroop task directly taxes the autonomy component in early reading by requiring participants to name a primary stimulus (color or picture) while ignoring a printed word (e.g., naming the picture of a desk with the word cat written on it, or naming the ink color "blue" for the word red printed in blue ink). In the picture-word version of the task, interference results when the reader cannot help but read the printed word while attempting to name the picture. Interference is determined by comparing the time it takes to complete the naming of the primary stimulus in a Stroop condition against the naming of a control having random letter strings or no conflicting print at all.

Several studies have linked the development of Stroop interference to the development of reading skill. Studies by Stanovich, Cunningham, and West (1981) and Guttentag and Haith (1978) found an increase in Stroop interference from the beginning to the end of the first-grade year. Ehri (1976) found that early and proficient readers showed larger interference, compared with late and less proficient readers. Similarly, Schadler and Thissen (1981) found that Stroop interference from words increased until children's reading skills reached a fourth-grade reading level, after which interference declined (see also Golinkoff & Rosinski, 1976). In later elementary school, as children become better able to inhibit distractions, the level of interference is decreased ( Pritchard & Neumann, 2004; Tipper, Bourque, Anderson, & Brehaut, 1989). Although the overall size of the Stroop effect may change, the effect itself does not disappear across the life span ( Comalli, Wapner, & Werner, 1962).

Given that Stroop interference seems to develop along with reading skill, what exactly becomes processed autonomously as reading becomes automatic? Some early findings imply that not only are words processed autonomously but also letter units may be ( Guttentag & Haith, 1978). Some researchers hypothesize that children begin the process of learning to read by using small units that map letters onto distinct phonemes, called grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules (or GPC; Coltheart & Leahy, 1992; Perry, Ziegler, & Coltheart, 2002). A grapheme is a single letter (e.g., t-) or letter cluster ( sh-) that gets mapped on to a single phoneme or sound. According to this view, children initially read using GPC units, making use of larger letter-sound mappings only later when they have built up a large sight-word vocabulary. An alternative view is that children begin to read using larger sublexical units that engage either word analogies or rime units for word decoding ( Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003). Rime units are the part of a single-syllable word used in a rhyme (e.g., c at, th at; Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995). Stroop interference might be expected to be different depending on the size of the units used. In the current study, we presented children with pictures containing pronounceable nonwords, words containing high-probability GPC units, words containing high-probability rime units, and words containing both.

Reading comprehension

Finally, to determine whether there were benefits from fluent text reading, we needed to have an assessment of reading comprehension. For this, we assessed children's comprehension using the reading comprehension subtest of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT). We selected this test because of its good psychometric properties and because it seemed to cover a very basic ingredient of reading comprehension, that is, that children should be able to answer comprehension questions (both simple and more inferential) following the reading of a text. Being able to answer questions regarding literal and inferential information following the reading of a text has been demonstrated to be a key discriminator between skilled and less skilled comprehenders ( Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Casteel, 1993; Long, Oppy, & Seely, 1997).

To sum, the purposes of the present study were two. The first was to develop an empirically based model of the development of fluent and automatic reading in the early elementary school years. In particular, we were interested in determining how lexical and sublexical processes (word reading, nonword reading, orthographic processing, and rapid object naming) and reading autonomy (Stroop) operate together to produce the development of fluent text reading and good comprehension of text. The second was to determine whether fluent text reading provided additional benefits for reading comprehension beyond those skills involved in word-reading fluency alone. First-, second-, and third-grade children were asked to complete a series of reading tasks targeting reading fluency, reading autonomy, and reading comprehension. Performance on each task was examined for developmental change across grade levels. Then, structural equation modeling was carried out to evaluate how these factors operate together to produce fluent text reading and good comprehension.

Method

Participants

Participants were 99 first-grade (mean age = 7 years, 1 month; range = 5 years, 7 months to 8 years, 2 months), 79 second-grade (mean age = 8 years, 1 month; range = 7 years, 1 month to 9 years, 1 month), and 71 third-grade (mean age = 9 years, 0 months; range = 7 years, 11 months to 10 years, 4 months) children attending four public schools located in communities in urban northeast Georgia or suburban central New Jersey, USA. Approximately 41% were African American, 27% were European American, 23% were Hispanic American, 5% were Asian American, and 4% were other or unknown; 53% were female and 47% were male. All children in general education classrooms participated with the exception of those currently receiving English-as-a-second-language instruction or those in self-contained classrooms for special education. Children were not excluded on the basis of reading disability. The children attended schools in which approximately 76% received free and reduced-cost lunch.

Stimuli and procedures

Children were given a mixture of standardized and experimenter-constructed reading measures during the spring term (seventh and eighth month) of the school year. The order of the standardized measures was counterbalanced with the experimental reading measures, such that half the children received the standardized measures first and the other half received the experimenter-constructed reading measures first.

Standardized reading measures

The standardized reading measures were the following:

1. Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) Sight Word Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency subtests, Form A (1999). The Sight Word Efficiency subtest asks children to name all of the words they can from a list of words in 45 seconds. The Phonemic Decoding Efficiency subtest requires children to pronounce all of the phonetically regular nonwords they can in a list in 45 seconds. Concurrent validity estimates reported in the test manual have a median of .91 in grades 1 through 3. Alternate form reliabilities have a median of .97 in grades 1 through 3.

2. Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT; 1992) Reading Comprehension subtest. The WIAT Reading Comprehension subtest consists of a number of passages that increase in complexity. Moreover, passage questions move from assessing literal to inferential comprehension, consistent with research on the development of reading comprehension ( Cain et al., 2004; Hannon & Daneman, 2001). In this assessment, a comprehension question is asked when the child completes the reading of a passage, and the child answers the question aloud in his or her own words. The WIAT is discontinued once the child misses four sequential questions. Validity estimates of this subtest reported in the test manual have a median of .74 and a reliability of .91 in grades 1 through 3.

3. Gray Oral Reading Test-Third Edition (GORT-3, 1992). The GORT-3 is an assessment of proficiency in the oral reading of text. The test is designed to evaluate text-reading fluency and consists of a series of passages that increase in difficulty. The test has several subscales, but we focused on reading rate for the purpose of this study. Accuracy and rate are tabulated for each passage until the reading becomes too slow and inaccurate and meets the discontinue rule established by standardization. The reading of each passage received a rating for reading rate assigned by the test makers that is based on standardized data regarding how long it took children to read each passage. These ratings are then summed to form a cumulative reading rate score. This score served as our indicator of text-reading fluency. Validity estimates for the passage-reading rate scores presented in the test manual range from .34 to .82, with a median validity of .65. The test has been independently validated for a diverse population of children ( Craig, Thompson, Washington, & Potter, 2004). Reliability estimates for the assessment of passage-reading rate range from .82 to .92, with a median reliability of .90.

4. Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing Rapid Object Naming subtest (CTOPP-RON; 1999). The Rapid Object Naming subtest of the CTOPP-RON measures the time children take to name six different objects alternately presented randomly over 72 objects. The test is said to be a measure of the efficient retrieval of visual and phonological information from long-term memory. The manual reports reliability estimates for children in the current age range from .73 to .93 on this sub-test, with a median of .77, and validity estimates against reading measures ranging from .30 to .54, with a median of .44.

Experimenter-constructed reading tasks

The experimenter-constructed reading tasks were designed to provide a more fine-grained assessment on aspects of early reading not covered by the standardized measures of reading, particularly those related to the automaticity aspects of reading. These tasks were all presented on a Dell Inspiron 8000 lap-top computer using E-Prime experiment software (from Psychology Software Tools, Version 5.0; Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2001), which was connected to a serial response box (Psychology Software Tools, Model # 200A). Children were tested in a quiet location in their school. Each participant was seated in front of the computer screen and asked to hold the microphone/response box while the experimenter read a set of instructions aloud from the computer screen for each task. For tasks using the microphone, the accuracy of participants' responses was recorded directly by the experimenter as incorrect if the item was not appropriately named. It was scored as a mechanical error if the microphone was not triggered by the child's voice or if it was triggered by an extraneous noise unrelated to the experiment (e.g., background noise, cough, sneeze, pre-articulation response such as "tsk").

Results

The findings were analyzed in two phases. First, we carried out simple cross-sectional analyses to assess developmental change in the computerized tasks and standardized tests. Then, with knowledge of how children progressed on the individual tasks, we carried out tests of theory using structural equation modeling of the relationships among the tasks.

Analyses of developmental change on tasks and tests

Analyses of standardized measures

We began by carrying out basic analyses of variance of the standardized test data (TOWRE-SWE and PDE, WIAT-RC, CTOPP-RON, and GORT-3) using Grade as a between-subjects factor, focusing on raw scores for the tests. The raw score means and standard deviations for these subtests and their corresponding standard scores can be found in Table 1 .

For each assessment, there was improved performance throughout the early elementary school grades. For the TOWRE, there was a significant main effect of Grade on both the SWE subtest, F (2, 246) = 83.45, and the PDE subtest, F (2, 246) = 57.197, both p < .001. Bonferroni post-hoc follow-up tests indicated that third graders read significantly more sight words and nonwords than second graders, who, in turn, read more words and non-words than first graders, all p < .001. For the WIAT-RC, there was also significant main effect of Grade, F (2, 246) = 80.21, p < .001. Again, post-hoc tests indicated that older children answered more passage questions correctly than younger children, all p < .001. Finally, for the CTOPP-RON, there was a significant main effect of Grade, F (2, 246) = 22.12, p < .001. Post-hoc tests indicated that first graders took longer to name all the pictures than second graders, who took longer than third graders, all p < .05. For the GORT-3, there was a significant main effect of grade on reading rate sum scores, F (2, 246) = 75.74, p < .001. Post-hoc tests indicated that first graders read the texts at a slower rate than second graders, who in turn read more slowly than third graders, all p < .001.

Computerized reaction time (RT) tasks

For all computerized RT tasks, to identify RTs and error rates that qualified for further analysis, the following steps were conducted on the raw data. First, all RTs for incorrect responses were eliminated from the data and their responses counted as errors. Then, all mechanical errors (as defined above) and their corresponding RTs were eliminated from the data. Next, mean RT and standard deviations were calculated for every participant in the study. Then, RT trials greater than 2 standard deviations above each participant's mean and less than 200 ms were removed from the data as outliers. Finally, for each participant, means were recalculated for RT and error rates for each condition. These means formed the basic data for subsequent analyses (see Table 2 ).

Experimental spelling task

For this task, we were interested in whether children's knowledge of correct spellings could be accessed quickly with age. An analysis of variance comparing mean RTs and error rates for this task as a function of Grade indicated a significant main effect of Grade on RTs, F(2, 246) = 9.72, and error rates, F(2, 246) = 98.64, both p < .001. Third graders accessed this knowledge more quickly than first graders and more accurately than children in the earlier grades ( p < .01). Second graders made these decisions more accurately than first graders ( p < .001). For subsequent analyses, mean RTs and error rates served as indicators of the development of spelling knowledge in these children.

In sum, between first and third grade in early elementary school, we found evidence of development on all tasks potentially related to fluent reading and automatic reading in young children. Compared with younger children, third-grade children pronounced sight words and nonwords at a faster rate on the TOWRE, read text passages at a faster rate on the GORT-3, and read single words more quickly and accurately. Older children made doublet decisions regarding consonants more quickly and accurately and regarding vowels more accurately. They determined correct spellings of words more quickly and accurately. They also named pictures more quickly on the CTOPP-RON. Moreover, third graders could answer more comprehension questions correctly after reading passages than first graders on the WIAT-RC. The sole exception to this was the pattern of developmental change on the Stroop task, which found similar patterns of interference with Stroop interference as a function of grade, although third graders showed less interference overall.

Structural equation modeling

Structural equation modeling in LISREL was conducted to examine the relations between the various measures potentially related to the development of fluency during the early elementary school years. The structural equation modeling was carried out in two phases to evaluate particular models: (a) a measurement modeling phase to identify whether the observed variables fit the latent factor structure proposed by theory, and (b) a structural modeling phase to test the explanatory relationships indicated between predictor and outcome variables by particular models ( Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1996).

Measurement modeling phase

In this phase, relations among variables thought to be potentially relevant to reading fluency according to variants of automaticity theory were determined using LISREL being as inclusive as possible with regard to the variables that might be considered to be relevant. In the measurement modeling phase, we included all tasks. We used raw scores from the standardized assessments rather than age-based standard scores because the correlations between the raw and age-based standard scores correlated > .90, but the raw scores allowed us to evaluate the grade effects directly in terms of potential changing relationships between variables as a function of age. In this initial phase, text-reading fluency and reading comprehension were considered outcome variables. We defined our interest in reading fluency to be those aspects of reading that relate to better and worse comprehension.

The correlation matrix for each grade level was used separately as input to LISREL 8.30 ( Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1996, 1999) and is the focus of the analysis. We considered that autonomous reading would consist of a latent factor comprising the mean difference in RT between letter controls and the three conditions in which the interfering stimuli contained a highly predictable GPC unit (High-GPC + Low-Rime, High-GPC + High-Rime, and Nonwords). We assumed a latent factor of word-reading fluency comprising the number of sight words read for the TOWRE sight-word efficiency, the mean WPM calculated for the single-word-naming task, and the mean accuracies for that task. We also included in this latent word-fluency factor the number of nonwords read in TOWRE phonemic-decoding efficiency and the number of seconds to complete the CTOPP-RON task. As noted earlier, nonword reading is generally considered a key indicator of a child's ability to read unknown words. Further, rapid autonomous naming is thought to share many of the skills underlying word-identification speed, such as quickly perceiving stimuli, retrieving symbolic information from long-term memory, and phonological production ( Wolf et al., 2000). Thus, it seemed appropriate to have this variable serve as an indicator of word-reading fluency. Finally, we also included in this latent factor the RT and accuracy means for all orthographic knowledge task conditions because orthographic knowledge is thought to be important to the fluent identification of words ( Cassar & Treiman, 1997; Olson et al., 1985). Both of these factors (word-reading fluency and autonomous reading) served as predictors of the GORT-3 and the WIAT.

Measurement modeling was carried out for each grade separately. We used several indicators for lack of model fit recommended by Kline (2005) and Schumacker and Lomax (1996). It is traditional to present the model χ ² fit index, which tests "the difference in fit between a given overidentified model and a just-identified version of it" ( Kline, 2005, p. 136). A nonsignificant p > .05 is an acceptable fit. This is generally not the preferred fit index for various reasons and needs to be supplemented with other indicators of fit. We included the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) as an assessment of simple model misspecification where RMSEA < .08 indicates an acceptable and < .06 a good fit. We also provide the goodness of fit index (GFI), an absolute fit index that estimates proportion of variability in the sample matrix explained by the predicted covariance matrix, and the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), an incremental fit index sensitive to misspecified factor loadings that is parsimony adjusted. For these, fits > .90 are considered acceptable and > .95 a good fit.

Overall, measurement model results indicated an unacceptable fit for first grade, χ ² (100) = 256.71, p < .001; RMSEA = .11; GFI = .77; TLI = .80. The same was true for second grade, χ ² (100) = 326.70, p < .001; RMSEA = .17; GFI = .66; TLI = .61; and for third grade, χ ² (100) = 276.69, p < .001; RMSEA = .14; GFI = .70; TLI = .57. However, a perusal of fitted standardized residuals indicated the source of the ill fit. We found that large residuals (> 2.58) were consistently associated with the orthographic tasks at each grade level (5 of 5 for first grade, 7 of 10 for second grade, and 7 of 9 for third grade). Although we made several other attempts to include these variables in the model, every other attempt produced the same result. Thus, the results of this measurement modeling indicated that it was best simply to exclude these orthographic variables from further model testing. When these variables were excluded, the models obtained reached an acceptable fit to data for first, χ ² (33) = 40.44, p = .170; RMSEA = .034; GFI = .93; TLI = .99; and third grade, χ ² (33) = 51.30, p = .022; RMSE = .059; GFI = .90; TLI = .92, although the fit for the second grade did not quite meet established levels, χ ² (33) = 62.18, p = .002; RMSEA = .10; GFI = .87; TLI = .91. However, in the interest of parsimony, we deemed it better to proceed by testing the same models for all grades.

Tests of the hypothesized structural models

Structural equation modeling was used to examine the role of word-reading fluency, autonomous word reading, and text-reading fluency in benefiting reading comprehension skills. We tested two theoretical versions of the way that these skills related to one another: (a) text reading as mediator model and (b) simple reading fluency model.

Simple reading fluency model

This model would state that reading fluency is a rather general trait of skilled readers and that, at least for young readers building fluency, it is a general trait that predicts comprehension. This model does not distinguish text-reading from word-reading fluency skill and represents text-reading fluency as merely another indicator of reading fluency. Thus, in this model, children's scores on both subtests of the TOWRE, mean single-word-reading time and accuracy on the single-word-naming task, CTOPP-RON, and scores on the GORT-3 all served as indicators of a reading fluency factor.

Similar to the previous model, it was predicted that autonomous reading interference should be correlated with the development of reading fluency, particularly as reading automaticity emerges. This view would also seem to state that the emergence of all aspects of automaticity, that is, fluent reading and autonomous reading, should be related to improved comprehension. Thus, as before, children's interference scores for the Stroop task served as indicators of the autonomous reading factor.

We should note that this and the previous model are identical in most respects with the exception that the parameters linking text-reading fluency to reading comprehension and automatic reading to text-reading fluency are now eliminated. With two fewer parameters included, this model is simpler and more parsimonious than the previous one.

The proposed theoretical model provided a reasonable fit according to most of the fit indexes for the first-grade data, χ ²(33) = 40.44, p = .170; RM-SEA = .034; GFI = .93; TLI = .99; and third-grade data, χ ²(33) = 51.30, p = .022; RMSEA = .059; GFI = .90; TLI = .92, but a less acceptable fit for the second-grade data χ ²(33) = 62.18, p = .002; RMSEA = .10; GFI = .87; TLI = .91. However, as before, given the similarity between first- and third-grade data, it seemed more parsimonious to examine the same model for second grade. All factor loadings were significant at the p < .05 level for all relevant variables at each grade level. Standardized path weights and t-values can be found in Table 4 . All factor loadings for each grade were significant at the p < .05 level.

As noted in Table 4 and Figures 3a, 3b, and 3c , for all grades there was a significant path between reading fluency and reading comprehension ( p < .05) indicating that, as children become fluent readers, they also comprehend what they read better. As before, autonomous reading interference was uncorrelated with reading fluency at first grade, r = .03, and second grade r = .07, p > .10, but, by third grade, children who continued to show large amounts of autonomous reading interference tended to display significantly worse reading fluency ( r = −.24, t(31) = 2.30, p < .05). Autonomous reading interference was a significant predictor of reading comprehension in first grade, t(31) = 2.33, p < .05, but not in second or third grades, both p > .10. Thus, what utility autonomous reading aspect of reading has for reading comprehension disappears once basic reading fluency is established. Moreover, continued difficulty recovering from Stroop interference seems to be associated with difficulties with establishing reading fluency.

It is important to note, however, that an examination of the variance accounted for in reading comprehension by this structural equation model pointed to the declining influence of general reading fluency and autonomous reading on reading comprehension with age. Taken together, the amount of variance accounted for in reading comprehension by the structural equations in this model decreased from 75% in first grade, to 45% in second grade, and 39% in third grade. This supports the common observation that, as children become older and their texts become more difficult, we need to look beyond reading fluency to other skills and knowledge (i.e., vocabulary knowledge, world knowledge, inferencing ability) to account for reading comprehension ability.

Discussion

Despite the popularity of automaticity views regarding the development of reading fluency over the past 30 years, there have been remarkably few investigations examining the interrelationships between the proposed features of automaticity and the development of reading. Most typically, investigations have focused on two or three elements of this view simultaneously (e.g., Fuchs et al., 2001; Jenkins et al., 2003; Stanovich et al., 1981; Young & Bowers, 1995). Although it is impossible to capture in a single study all of the elements that might be relevant to the developing role of reading fluency in reading comprehension, the current study made a comprehensive attempt to capture most of the important factors on which automaticity views have focused. This study provides some clarification regarding how the elements of automaticity, word-reading fluency, text-reading fluency, and autonomous reading, operate together to produce good comprehension in the early elementary school years.

Our study examined the suitability of two versions of the automaticity view of reading. For the text reading as mediator model, fluent readers are said to be better able to utilize text fluency-related skills such as sentence-parsing skills ( Schreiber, 1980) and the contextual activation of word meanings ( Jenkins et al., 2003) to aid in the comprehension of text once their basic word reading is automatic enough to free up cognitive resources. The current study found no evidence for this mediating role of text-reading fluency. Instead, a simpler model treating text-reading fluency as merely another indicator of reading fluency skill provided a more appropriate account for our data. Thus, our data supported a simple reading fluency model for the early elementary school years.

This lack of a mediating effect between word-reading fluency and reading comprehension skill for text-reading fluency is surprising given recent findings regarding the contribution of text fluency to reading comprehension ( Cain et al., 2004; Jenkins et al., 2003). For example, Jenkins et al. found that text-reading fluency was the primary factor in predicting reading comprehension.

What can account for the differences between these results and ours? We think this is where a developmental account of reading skill must take place. In virtually all the studies finding additional benefits from text reading, children have tended to be older and more fundamentally fluent than the children in the current study ( Cain et al., 2004; Jenkins et al., 2003; Nation & Snowling, 1998). Even the skilled older readers in our study were unable to use the additional cognitive resources gained by fluent text reading to comprehend text. We know that fluent early elementary school children use syntactically appropriate prosody and expression when they read ( Clay & Imlach, 1971; Zutell & Rasinski, 1991). However, some research suggests that the full understanding of syntax is still under development during the age ranges we tested here ( Traxler, 2002; Willows & Ryan, 1986). It may be that the imposition of syntactically appropriate phrasing during the reading of text is not yet automatic enough to free up resources that can be used for comprehension. Further, it is unclear whether children can orchestrate automatic word and text reading in the pursuit of better reading comprehension at this stage of reading ( Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001).

Comprehension is always an interaction between skills of the reader and characteristics of the text. Consequently, it may be that children at this age are, indeed, able to use their cognitive resources gained from fluent text reading to assist in comprehension, but that early texts are simply not complex enough to demand these additional resources. As children get older, the demands of the texts themselves will become greater ( Hiebert & Fisher, 2005). It may be that it is not until later that children can use these additional benefits from text-level fluency to improve their comprehension.

Thus, we conclude that, in the early stages of the development of reading fluency, children use their word-reading skills to comprehend the meanings of text, so the simple reading fluency model applies. In fact, a study by Shinn et al. (1992) suggests that this may be the case. They found that, for third graders, a unitary factor placing word- and text-level skills and comprehension skills on the same factor provided the best fit for third graders, but by fifth grade, text-level skills had more closely aligned themselves with reading comprehension and required a multifaceted view of reading skill.

On a cautionary note, however, the sample sizes that we had available to us were somewhat smaller than ideal. One rule of thumb for deciding sample sizes in SEM is approximately 100 cases per sample. Another is 5 to 10 observations per parameter. Our sample sizes are clearly toward the lower end of these guidelines. Consequently, parameters that we did not find to be significantly significant or ill-fitting should not be dismissed completely out of hand. It was the case, however, that the critical parameter that distinguished the two models (i.e., the link between text-reading rate and reading comprehension) varied little across grade level, was very close to zero, and was in the opposite direction in two of the three cases. We think it unlikely that the addition of 20 or more participants at each grade level would have altered our findings dramatically.

One disappointment was our inability to discern the role of orthographic knowledge in the development of reading fluency and reading comprehension. We had supposed that including timed orthographic tasks might provide us with evidence that orthographic knowledge is related to other reading fluency skills. In support of this, we did find that older children were quicker and more accurate in making doublet decisions and in discerning the correct spelling of a word. This is generally consistent with other orthographic research using timed tasks ( Gayan & Olson, 2003; Olson et al., 1985). However, as a group, the variables from our orthographic tasks were a source of ill-fit in the measurement modeling. Measurement issues are not uncommon in research on orthographic processing. For example, Cunningham, Perry, and Stanovich (2001) found low reliability on several commonly used orthographic tasks, making interpreting their role in reading difficult. Findings on one orthographic task may not always generalize to very similar sorts of tasks ( Stanovich & Siegel, 1994). The dimensionality or covariance among orthographic tasks may also change during the early elementary school years ( Gayan & Olson; Notenboom & Reitsma, 2003). Finally, the actual use of orthographic information during reading may be partly attributable to task features that encourage or discourage the use of orthographic information ( Martensen, Dijkstra, & Maris, 2005). Thus, the mere validity of orthographic tasks such as the ones we used can be questioned (see also Vellutino et al., 1994). Consequently, we hesitate to say that orthographic information is not useful for fluent reading and merely conclude that our current data do not provide us with a theoretical basis for deciding how it might be used.

A second potential issue for our conclusions is that our treatment of reading comprehension may not have been as complex as it needed to be in contrast with our treatment of reading fluency. It may have been that, if we had used a different measure of reading comprehension, we might have found a different role for text-reading fluency on comprehension. While this is possible, we believe our measure of reading comprehension included key features important in the early elementary school years. We selected the assessment that we did after evaluating a number of other standardized assessments of early reading comprehension. The WIAT Reading Comprehension test was chosen for its consistency with what many teachers consider a key indicator of reading comprehension (i.e., the child can answer questions about the text; Byers, 1998; Richardson, Anders, Tidwell, & Lloyd, 1991), while avoiding the presence of false test floors that include items outside of the domain of reading comprehension (e.g., single-word decoding only, letter recognition) that are sometimes found in standardized reading comprehension tests for early elementary school. Other research on this test suggested it correlates well with other tests of reading comprehension and that teachers view it as valid (Byers; Foegen, Espin, Allinder, & Markell, 2001; Smith & Smith, 1998). Moreover, the test we used assessed both literal and inferential comprehension, all important to reading comprehension ( Cain et al., 2004). Still, it would be important to replicate these findings by using a broader range of comprehension measures than was present in the current study. Moreover, future research should consider the issue of the complexity of the to-be-comprehended texts in considering the relationship between text-reading fluency and comprehension.

A third potential issue for our conclusions is that our measure of text-reading fluency may not have been as complex as it needed to be because we relied heavily on a single text-reading measure, the GORT-3. However, reading fluency is typically defined as comprising text reading that is quick, automatic, and expressive. The current study lacked a measure of expressiveness during the reading of text. An earlier study by Schwanenflugel et al. (2004) had found that one measure of expressiveness, prosody, did not account for significant variance beyond word-reading fluency in predicting reading comprehension in second- and third-grade children. On the other hand, it is possible that other measures of expressiveness, such as those described by Cowie, Douglas-Cowie, and Wichmann (2002), may have accounted for significant variance above and beyond that accounted for by the GORT-3. The GORT-3 stresses rate and accuracy and not expressiveness. Expressiveness may be more relevant to the syntactic processing features of text fluency than rate and accuracy are. Future research should include a broader range of measures directly targeted at this expressiveness feature of text-reading fluency.

With these limitations in mind, having found support for a simple reading fluency model for early elementary school children, we outline our findings with regard to the development of each of the components of automaticity. We describe how these elements might fit together to produce good comprehension.

A number of descriptions of reading skill note the foundational quality of quick and accurate word and text reading to reading skill as a whole ( Fuchs et al., 2001; Stanovich, 1980). In the current study, we represented this skill through a combination of psychometric and computerized assessments at the word and text level, and we assessed both accuracy and speed of reading. We also included nonword reading as an indicator of the ability to recognize unknown words. We included rapid object naming, because of its linkage in prior research to fluent word and text reading ( Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). On all fluency-related tasks, children were found to increase their speed and accuracy from first to third grade. Further, this reading-fluency factor was an important predictor of reading comprehension. In each grade, children who had superior reading fluency had better reading comprehension. Thus, our data were consistent with automaticity views that predict that as children become quicker and more accurate, there are freed-up resources that can be used for improved comprehension, but these resources emanate mainly from superior word-reading skills and not from the special skills associated with fluent text reading per se.

Autonomy is a second aspect of automaticity accounts of the development of reading fluency. Autonomous reading has been shown to develop early in the development of reading skill. This component was indicated by interference scores obtained from the Stroop interference task. We found an interesting pattern in the relationship between this autonomous reading component and other components of our model suggesting that Stroop interference may change in its meaning between first and third grade. In first graders, although the effect was small, Stroop interference was positively related to better reading comprehension skill. In second grade, Stroop interference was related to neither reading fluency nor reading comprehension, presumably because most children were displaying reading interference. By third grade, children who were still showing large degrees of interference from the conflicting labels were likely to be less fluent readers. Further, because we identified that the interference found in the Stroop task occurred in words having high-probability GPC units, we can state that their difficulty probably stemmed from difficulties in unitizing these sublexical features.

We think that our study helps better place the autonomy component within automaticity approaches to the development of reading skill. Earlier discussions of this component viewed the uncertain relationship between Stroop interference and word fluency as problematic for automaticity views of reading ( Stanovich, 1990). Autonomy was originally considered to be the by-product of a large amount of practice ( Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977) and finding interference from almost the onset of reading was viewed as problematic. Recent reconceptualizations of automaticity suggest that, instead, automatic retrieval and its concomitant benefits for attentional resources accrue very quickly in learning a new skill ( Logan, 1988, 1997). Thus, the development of autonomous reading early in the process of learning to read is to be expected as sublexical patterns become learned and have begun to be practiced. This new-found autonomy contributes to the resource benefits that enable good reading comprehension. Thus, the current study indicates that there is a place for this component early in the acquisition of reading and that it is indicative of increasing skill.

This Stroop interference takes on a different meaning once children have achieved autonomous reading. Most children continue to develop increased fluency in recognizing new words throughout third grade (as our data indicate). By third grade, the reduced resources that word reading in general now takes allow them to use these resources in the Stroop task to inhibit the task features that distract them. However, the persistence of a difficulty in overcoming interference from irrelevant print (as indicated by large interference scores) is a sign of a basic fluency problem, which manifests as a significant negative correlation between reading fluency and autonomous reading interference in our data.

Finally, we have shown that reading fluency and automatic reading account for considerable variance in children's reading comprehension throughout the early elementary school years. However, findings also point to the diminishing role that automaticity plays in reading comprehension as children get older. The variance accounted for by predictors in the model declined steadily from first to third grade. Presumably, once most children are fluent readers, factors other than reading fluency become important for good comprehension. As noted earlier, this may be because other factors, such as general oral language skills and the ability to draw appropriate inferences, become more important as children move from learning to read to reading to learn ( Chall, 1996; Nation & Snowling, 1998).

Despite the emphasis of the current study on fluency as a key skill for comprehension, we do not wish to be misunderstood as to what we believe the implications of our study are for instruction during the early grades. No matter what the age of the students, comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading and should receive emphasis instructionally throughout. At all grades, there was significant variance in children's reading comprehension not accounted for by fluency. Thus, if anything, our findings support the importance of carrying out fluency-oriented instruction alongside comprehension instruction. Further, the key is to remember that fluency is an important bridge to comprehension but not the ultimate destination. Once fluent reading has been achieved by children, fluency-oriented instruction can be phased out because, as our findings show, individual differences in comprehension begin to be increasingly related to things other than reading fluency.

In sum, the current study has found support for a simple reading fluency view in automaticity accounts of the development of fluent and automatic reading during the early elementary school years. Future research should assess the continuing developmental path of reading fluency and these other language factors in producing good comprehension as children become older.

Acknowledgments

We thank Samantha Johnson, Caroline Groff, Franklin Turner, Ann Marie Hamilton, Barbara Bradley, Matthew Quirk, and Deborah Woo for assisting in the collection of data. The project was supported by the Interagency Education Research Initiative, a program of research managed jointly by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the National Institutes of Health (NICHD/NIH). Funding for the project was provided by NICHD NIH Grant 7 R01 HD040746-06.

Biographies

Contributor Information

PAULA J. SCHWANENFLUGEL, University of Georgia, Athens, USA.

ELIZABETH B. MEISINGER, University of Georgia, Athens, USA.

JOSEPH M. WISENBAKER, University of Georgia, Athens, USA.

MELANIE R. KUHN, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.

GREGORY P. STRAUSS, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, USA.

ROBIN D. MORRIS, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA.

References

SCHWANENFLUGEL PJ, HAMILTON AM, KUHN MR, WISENBAKER J, STAHL SA. Becoming a fluent reader: Reading skill and prosodic features in the oral reading of young readers. Journal of Educational Psychology. 2004;96:119-129. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] Google Scholar]

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Becoming a fluent and automatic reader in the early elementary school years

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The goals of this study were to (a) develop an empirically based model regarding the development of fluent and automatic reading in the early elementary school years and (b) determine whether fluent text-reading skills provided benefits for reading comprehension ...

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Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression.Fluent reading builds stamina for reading lengthy or complex texts. Reading fluency serves as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.

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Fifth grade has turned into a difficult year for Jonah. He is a bright student, but he has difficulty reading. Although he can accurately sound out the words he encounters, he plods along word-by-word, often hesitating at challenging vocabulary. His oral reading shows little attention to punctuation and phrasing, and it lacks expression and enthusiasm. Jonah can, however, understand material read to him. His difficulty seems to lie somewhere on the path from decoding to comprehension-in reading fluency.

Since the publication of the National Reading Panel report (2000) and other recent scholarly reviews of scientific research (Chard, Vaughn, & Tyler, 2002; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; Rasinski & Hoffman, 2003), reading fluency has taken a front seat in discussions about student reading success and effective instruction in reading. Yet programs and materials addressing reading instruction and teacher training seldom tackle reading fluency (Rasinski & Zutell, 1996). This lack may be due to the fact that fluency has long been associated with oral reading, a form of reading traditionally viewed as having little importance in learning to read (Gibson & Levin, 1975; Smith, 2002).

Three Dimensions of Reading Fluency

Defining reading fluency may help clarify the issue. Successful reading requires readers to process the text (the surface level of reading) and comprehend the text (the deeper meaning). Reading fluency refers to the reader's ability to develop control over surface-level text processing so that he or she can focus on understanding the deeper levels of meaning embedded in the text.

Reading fluency has three important dimensions that build a bridge to comprehension. The first dimension is accuracy in word decoding. Readers must be able to sound out the words in a text with minimal errors. In terms of skills, this dimension refers to phonics and other strategies for decoding words. The second dimension is automatic processing. Readers need to expend as little mental effort as possible in the decoding aspect of reading so that they can use their finite cognitive resources for meaning making (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). The third dimension is what linguists call prosodic reading (Schreiber, 1980, 1991; Schreiber & Read, 1980). The reader must parse the text into syntactically and semantically appropriate units. If readers read quickly and accurately but with no expression in their voices, if they place equal emphasis on every word and have no sense of phrasing, and if they ignore most punctuation, blowing through periods and other markers that indicate pauses, then it is unlikely that they will fully understand the text.

Assessing Reading Fluency

Teachers can easily assess each of the three dimensions of reading fluency. To determine proficiency in decoding connected text, calculate the percentage of words a reader can accurately decode on grade-level material. An accuracy level of 90-95 percent is usually considered adequate. Thus, a 3rd grader who is progressing normally in decoding accuracy should be able to read a 100-word text written at a 3rd grade level with no more than 10 uncorrected decoding errors. More than 10 uncorrected errors per 100 words indicates that decoding is a concern, one that requires additional instruction and practice.

Teachers can normally assess automaticity in decoding by looking at the student's reading rate. Reading rates increase as students mature, so the target reading rate increases as students move through school. An easy method for determining reading rate, and thus automaticity, involves having students orally read a grade-level passage for 60 seconds and then calculating the number of words read correctly (corrected errors count as words read correctly) (Deno, 1985). Compare students' scores with target rates (oral fluency norms) for each grade level (Rasinski, 2003). Readers who fall 20-30 percent below the target rate will normally require additional instruction.

The best way to assess prosodic reading is to listen to a student read a grade-level passage and to then judge the quality of the reading using a rubric that scores a student on the elements of expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace (see fig. 1, p. 49). Students who score poorly may be considered at risk in this dimension of reading fluency.
Figure 1. Multidimensional Fluency Scale
Figure 1. Multidimensional Fluency Scale

By having students read one or two grade-level passages for one minute each, teachers can get a quick sense of their students' level of decoding accuracy, automaticity, and prosodic reading. Although such quick assessments may not be definitive, they do provide teachers and school administrators with a method for screening new students, tracking students' ongoing progress in the various dimensions of reading fluency, and identifying the students who may require additional assessment and instruction.

Teaching Reading Fluency

Instruction in reading fluency depends on the area in which students require the most help. Students with difficulties in accuracy require instruction in learning how to decode words. Although teachers are familiar with this kind of instruction, which develops skills in phonics and decoding, they may not be as familiar with methods for developing students' strength in automaticity and prosodic reading.

In my own instructional efforts to develop automaticity and prosodic reading, I use assisted readings and repeated readings, two methods that research has shown to improve reading fluency (Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000; Rasinski & Hoffman, 2003). Students need to hear what fluent reading sounds like and how fluent readers interpret text with their voices.

Hearing fluent reading, however, is not the same as being a fluent reader. Fortunately, assisted readings can help. After reading a passage aloud to students, I ask them to follow along with me, first silently and then aloud, as a group. Sometimes I ask students to orally read a passage with a partner who is at the same reading level. At other times, I ask more fluent readers to read with students who are having difficulty with reading (Eldredge & Quinn, 1988; Topping, 1987a, 1987b, 1995) or I have students silently read while listening to a fluent rendering of the passage on tape (Carbo, 1978; Pluck, 1995). Such practices constitute a powerful strategy for improving fluency and comprehension.

Developing fluency in reading requires practice; this is where the method of repeated readings comes in (Samuels, 1979). Research indicates that repeated readings lead not only to improvement in reading the passage but also to improvement in decoding, reading rate, prosodic reading, and comprehension of passages that the reader has not previously seen (Dowhower, 1994; Koskinen & Blum, 1986; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000).

Passages meant to be read aloud as a performance-poetry, for example, or scripts, speeches, monologues, dialogues, jokes, and riddles-are perfect texts for developing fluency. I see many teachers converting their classrooms into poetry cafés and readers' theater festivals on Friday afternoons to give students the opportunity to perform the assigned texts that they have diligently practiced during the week.

The teacher plays a key role in developing prosodic reading skills by modeling prosodic reading in classroom read-aloud sessions and then discussing the specific oral interpretation that he or she chose. Coaching provides another opportunity for developing these skills by making students aware of their own interpretation of the text and moving readers toward deeper levels of interpretation and meaning.

Here are some comments I have heard teachers make while coaching students in oral interpretation.

"You got all the words right, Thomas, but you read too fast. It was hard for me to follow what you were trying to tell me."

"Eliza, the way you made each character sound different in this dialogue was fantastic. It was easy and fun to listen to these characters arguing."

"I really like how you paused between sentences. This gave me a chance to think about the author's message. Now think about finding places to pause for just a second more inside longer sentences."

"I loved how you made your voice strong and loud in this section. It really told me that this section of the passage was important."

"Try slowing down here and making your voice a bit softer. Remember, you're trying to tell me about something mysterious. Tell the story with your voice as well as with the words."

As assisted and repeated reading, coupled with coaching, become part of the classroom routine, teachers can track changes in students' accuracy, reading rate, and prosodic reading. Jonah, our struggling 5th grade reader, originally read a 4th grade-level passage at 60 words correct per minute and a 5th grade-level passage at 52 words correct per minute. A 5th grader, however, should be reading approximately 100-125 words correct per minute during the first half of the school year. After just two months of working in small groups with a reading teacher for three 40-minute sessions each week, Jonah's reading rate on 5th grade-level passages increased to 84 words correct per minute. His accuracy, prosodic reading, and comprehension improved as well.

Several instructional routines for developing reading fluency show promise for improving reading in all readers. Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (Stahl & Heubach, in press) has students engage in modeled, repeated, and assisted reading of passages from basal readers. The Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, Padak, Linek, & Sturtevant, 1994) uses poetry, monologues, dialogues, speeches, and other performance texts to promote reading fluency. Fast Start (Rasinski, 1995; Stevenson, 2002) promotes early reading fluency through parental involvement.

Confusing Fast with Fluent

The new focus on reading fluency has great potential for improving the reading achievement of all students, particularly those who have not met with great success in reading. I am, however, concerned about how some schools define reading fluency and how some teachers teach it. In some schools, where improvement of the reading rate has become the chief goal of fluency instruction, teachers admonish students to "pick up the pace," regularly time them on their reading to encourage them to beat their previous scores, and engage students in daily reading exercises that emphasize speed over meaning.

This is a corruption of the concept of reading fluency. If we emphasize speed at the expense of prosodic and meaningful reading, we will end up with fast readers who understand little of what they have read. Fluency instruction leads to impressive gains when it provides regular opportunities for expressive reading through assisted and repeated readings coupled with coaching; it doesn't require explicit reference to reading for speed. Students' reading rates will improve as they become naturally more efficient and confident in their ability to decode words.

Fluency Into the Future

Research (Pinnell et al., 1995) suggests that reading fluency is a crucial factor among 4th grade students, but it can also be an important issue beyond the elementary grades. I recently worked with a group of colleagues from Kent State University to examine the fluency of high school students in an urban setting. We found that variations in the reading fluency of these students accounted for approximately 30 percent of the variance in their performance on Ohio's High School Graduation Test. Clearly, this finding suggests that fluency may be an issue that goes well into the high school years, especially among students from less advantaged backgrounds.

If teachers and school leaders are truly committed to leaving no child behind in reading, then they must actively pursue the goal of reading fluency in elementary and middle school classrooms. Existing scientific research on reading fluency indicates that it is an important factor in reading education and thus should be part of any comprehensive and effective reading curriculum.

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Fifth grade has turned into a difficult year for Jonah. He is a bright student, but he has difficulty reading. Although he can accurately sound out the words he encounters, he plods along word-by-word, often hesitating at challenging vocabulary. His oral reading shows little attention to punctuation

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As students progress in their literacy understanding, they move from reading and writing single syllable words (often with consonant-vowel-consonant constructions) to reading and writing multisyllabic words. Instruction focused on teaching students about syllables often focuses on teaching different…

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Gradual Release of Responsibility Model (4)