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EDR8200 Dr. Kelsey

Scholarly Literature Review Synthesize the Scholarly Literature

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Reading Fluency: A Review of the Literature

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Daniel Coffin

Northcentral University
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Reading Fluency: A Review of the Literature

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature relevant to the development of reading

fluency and the relation of reading fluency to reading comprehension. A great deal of recent studies has

enabled researchers to begin creating models which map out not only the relationship between fluency

and comprehension, but add to these two the other subcomponents of reading developed in pre-literacy,

offering an explanation as to how these skills continue to influence reading success through the

mediating factors of phonics and reading fluency. For all this new understanding, however, there is still

much to learn about the way the major components of reading interact and how to leverage this

knowledge in the classroom to improve student reading outcomes. What follows is a review of recent

studies of reading fluency and reading comprehension, and some emergent themes from this research.

The Relationship of Pre-Literacy Skills, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension.

Oral reading fluency refers to the ability of a reader to quickly and accurately decode text.

Readers who are fluent are able to decode text with automaticity, or with a minimum of mental effort,

allowing them to attend to the ideas presented within the text rather than the text itself. Oral reading

fluency, then, is dependent upon a strong grasp of phonics and, in turn, permits the reader to develop

both reading prosody (reading aloud with appropriate intonation and phrasing) and reading

comprehension (Hilsmier, Wehby, & Falk, 2016).

Studies of reading acquisition in languages other than English have shown that reading fluency

does not necessarily have the same role in other languages that it does in English. In Mandarin Chinese,

for instance, which depends on a number of monosyllabic characters which serve as the smallest units

of meaning, morphological awareness (i.e. understanding of and ability to perceive and identify these

characters) is far more predictive of reading comprehension than phonological or orthographic

awareness (Li & Wu, 2015). In Dutch, which uses a similar grammar and syntax as English but with a
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great deal less orthographic depth (i.e. there is a much greater one-to-one sound-symbol

correspondence than in English), phonological awareness is predictive of reading comprehension as it

is in English, but to a lesser degree (Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2015). In both these languages,

as in English, fluency serves as a mediator between pre-literacy skills and reading comprehension,

influencing reading comprehension both directly (through word reading) and indirectly (by allowing

for greater meaning-making while reading, while relies not just on phonological decoding but on pre-

literacy listening comprehension as well) (Li & Wu, 2015; Kim & Wagner, 2015). The nature of this

mediator role, and the degree to which it mediates between pre-literacy language skills and reading

comprehension, however, is unclear, and appears to change as the reader develops in skill.

A greater knowledge of how pre-literacy skills influence the development of fluency and,

through it, the development of reading comprehension in languages other than English can help drive

not only further research in early English language and literacy acquisition but also to provide

background knowledge relevant to addressing the instructional needs of students who are English

language learners. A deeper understanding of how reading fluency influences how developing readers

apply pre-literacy language skills to the reading task at different points in their literacy development

can help teachers to determine which fluency interventions would be most appropriate and helpful for a

reader given his or her level of skill as a reader, as in the research showing that prosody becomes more

important to comprehension than decoding in the later primary and middle grades (Veenendaal, Groen,

& Verhoeven, 2015).

Socioeconomic Factors Influencing Oral Reading Disfluency

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Why do some students have great deficits in pre-literacy language skills entering into school?

Research indicates parents of higher socioeconomic status engage in greater amounts of child-directed

speech than those of lower socioeconomic status and use speech to elicit conversation with child rather

than to direct behavior (Hoff, 2003). Because of this lack of natural language development at home,

many students of lower socioeconomic status enter into formal schooling with deficits in vocabulary

size and less developed language skills, such as phonological awareness, than their higher

socioeconomic status peers (Basit, Hughes, Iqbal, & Cooper, 2015). These deficits have been shown to

persist or even increase as students progress through school, likely due to lack of exposure to print in

the home and diminished intrinsic motivation to read (Parker, Zaslofsky, Burns, Kanive, Hodgson,

Scholin, & Klingbeil, 2015). As phonological awareness is a prerequisite for oral reading fluency, these

deficits often manifest in disfluent oral reading.

By the time these students reach the middle grades however, years of oral reading disfluency

and concomitant reading frustration and avoidance frequently develop into disaffection from reading,

which in turn leads to overall diminished academic achievement, as students in the middle grades are

expected to be reading to learn rather than learning to read. These studies help to explain why the

prevailing paradigm of fluency development in the primary grades and comprehension instruction in

the middle and secondary grades is overly simplistic and fails students from less affluent backgrounds.

Students whose language and literacy acquisition is delayed because of their home environments need

the same sorts of literacy development instruction, but may need it longer and later into their school

careers to get onto even footing.

Oral vs. Silent Reading Fluency

By way of contrast with primary grades language arts curricula, middle grades classrooms

feature much more sustained silent reading (SSR). Many schools have even instituted a DEAR (Drop
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Everything and Read) time during the school day when all students are expected to read a book quietly

for 20-30 minutes. Research would indicate, however, that silent reading and oral reading are two

different types of experiences, and that silent reading does not contribute to reading comprehension

(Price, Meisinger, Louwerse, & DMello, 2015). This has important implications not only for how

language arts classes are structured, but also for the countless standardized tests of reading which are

administered to students to assess their reading ability and which call for texts to be read silently

these tests might not be accurately assessing the comprehension capabilities of these students.

Conclusion

While research has consistently shown the correlation between oral reading fluency and reading

comprehension, there remain a number of unanswered questions regarding the precise nature of the

reading fluency construct, how it relates to pre-literacy language skills and whether intensive fluency

interventions can compensate for their absence, and the connection of different aspects of fluency to

reading comprehension. These questions, however, provide great avenues for future research which can

further develop our understanding in these areas and our ability to better meet the needs of struggling

readers.

References

Basit, T.N., Hughes, A., Iqbal, Z., & Cooper, J. (2015). The influence of socio-economic status and
ethnicity on speech and language development. International Journal of Early Years Education,
23(1), 115-133.
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Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early
vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74(5), 1368-1378.

Kim, Y.G., & Wagner, R.K. (2015). Text (oral) reading fluency as a construct in reading development:
An investigation of its mediating role for children from grades 1 to 4. Scientific Studies of Reading,
19(3), 224-242.

Li, L., & Wu, X. (2015). Effects of metalinguistic awareness on reading comprehension and the
mediator role of reading fluency from grades 2 to 4. PLoS ONE, 10(3), 1-16.

Parker, D.C., Zaslofsky, A.F., Burns, M.K., Kanive, R., Hodgson, J., Scholin, S.E., & Klingbeil, D. A.
(2015). A brief report on the diagnostic accuracy of oral reading fluency and reading inventory
levels for reading failure risk among second- and third-grade students. Reading & Writing
Quarterly, 31(1), 55-67.

Price, K.W., Meisinger, E.B., Louwerse, M.M, & DMello, S. (2016). The contributions of oral and
silent reading fluency to reading comprehension. Reading Psychology, 37(2), 167-201.

Veenendaal, N.J., Groen, M.A., & Verhoeven, L. (2015). What oral text reading fluency can reveal
about reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 38(3), 213-225.