CHAPTER 14

Reading Fluency, Reading Rate.

And Comprehension
-William Grabe-

Reading fluency is an essential component of efficient reading-

comprehension abilities. Fluent L1 readers can read for extended periods of
time without difficulty or effort. Oral passage reading rate and extensive
reading are also strongly associated with L1 reading-comprehension abilities
at multiple age levels. Reading fluency in L2 settings is, however, beginning
to receive more attention, and many L2 reading researchers are stressing the
need for more research on fluency and more attention to fluency in reading
instruction.
The most important issue for reading fluency concerns its rile in
academic settings. L2 students in secondary and university contexts can
perform reasonably well on comprehension texts when given sufficient time to
complete the texts. In fact, fluency is what allows a reader to experience a
much larger amount of L2 input, to expand the breadth and depth of
vocabulary knowledge beyond direct instruction, to develop automatic word
recognition skills, to read for additional learning, to build reading motivation,
and, in L2 university contexts, to read the large amounts of material that might
be assigned every week.
Defining reading fluency
Fluency in reading is the ability to read rapidly with ease and accuracy,
and to read with appropriate expression and phrasing. Fluency, and especially
automaticity, allows readers to attend to the meaning of the text, the textual
context, and required background knowledge without being slowed down by
attention word-recognition demands. In discussion of fluency, automaticity is
defined as processing operations that are rapid, relatively resource-free, not
subject to interference, unconscious, and hard to suppress.
Accuracy is also seen as an essential component of reading fluency,
whether it involves recognition skills at the sub-word level, word level or text
level. Accuracy, as a component of reading fluency, is most closely associated
with word recognition in that fluent word recognition must not only be rapid
and automatic, it must also be complete and accurate.
A third component that s needed for reading fluency is a rapid overall
rate of reading for comprehension. Fluency requires an ability to maintain
ease of comprehension throughout an extended text. A final component of
fluency that is increasingly cited is the recognition of prosodic phrasing and
contours of the text while reading. Differences in reading fluency along these
lines are most evident during oral reading as opposed to silent reading, but
even with silent reading, it is difficult to imagine a fluent reader pausing at
inappropriate junctures or processing text chinks in ways that do not match
structural units in the continues prose.
In many L2 settings, especially in second language acquisition research,
when fluency is discussed, it is a relatively undefined, informal concept.
However, for any L2 language skill, fluency needs to incorporate word-
recognition accuracy as an assumed subcomponent. A key fluency issue
involves identifying the relevant stage in the cycle of learning new
information in which fluency is emphasized. After new L2 knowledge is
learned and practiced, the build-up of fluency skills that follows should not be
constrained by a simultaneous need for building accuracy.
Multiple settings for fluency development
The development of fluency varies widely depending n the age of
students, the relative proficiency of students as skilled or struggling readers,
and the language in which reading is carried out (L1 or L2). In L1 settings,
word-reading fluency appears to be a strong predictor or reading-
comprehension ability through second grade. By fourth grade, word-reading
fluency is no longer a significant predictor of reading comprehension for
fluent and grade level L1 readers. While L2 populations are extremely varied
among themselves, they nevertheless represent potentially distinct groups in
comparison with L1 groups.
One specific issue concerning L2 fluency is the impact of oral
performance on fluency measures. While there are several different ways to
assess reading fluency, much L1 fluency research assumes reasonable L1
speaking fluency, and uses measures that presume speaking fluency (oral
rereading, paired reading, rapid naming of words, informal reading
inventories). This issue would seem to be an empirical one rather than a
matter for theorizing.
A second specific issue involves the differing ages and educational
levels of L2 populations. It is clear that cognitive development aspects of
older L2 readers typically do not match the profile of L1 readers at the time
when they develop reading fluency. An alternative way to pursue research
comparing L1 and L2 readers for fluency development may be in terms of
their reading rates or sight-word efficiencies while reading.
Fluency research and the National Reading Panel
The report of the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) examined
research on reading on reading fluency and its impact on reading
comprehension. With respect to oral repeated reading, the NRP found 99
comparison experiments hat met their criteria for experimental research. The
research they reviewed strongly demonstrated that oral repeated reading of
texts improves reading fluency and overall reading comprehension. The NRP
examined a number o sub-types o studies in detail: (a) immediate effects
articles; (b) group experiments; and (c) single-subject studies.
Expanding the scope of fluency and its relation to comprehension
Kuhn and Stahl (2003) published a second major review of L1 reading
fluency instruction. They situated fluency practice as a central component of
Chall’s (1983) third stage of reading development. They reviewed 71 studies
involving reading-fluency instruction. Overall comparison between
independent rereading practices ad assisted reading showed that assisted
reading was somewhat more effective in fluency and comprehension
improvements.
Kuhn and Stahl also made a number of observations based on their
review and the NRP report. First, they argued that students are best supported
by fluency instruction when they are at a certain stage of reading abilities,
specifically at a level beyond the early word-recognition stage. Second,
rereading activities of many types appear to be generally effective as a way to
promote fluency among younger readers. They also noted that texts of varying
levels of difficulty generated the same types of results; no obvious
effectiveness trend was found for using difficult, grade-level, or easy texts
during fluency practice. A third major perspective on reading fluency, they
have pointed out that oral passage reading-rate measures provide one of the
strongest predictors of reading-comprehension abilities as measured by
standardized reading tests. They counted the number of words read correctly
and incorrectly and used a score based on words read correctly in one minute.
A further perspective on L1 reading fluency emphasizing automaticity s
provided by Samuels (2002, 2006a, 2006b) who has provided a number of
reviews of fluency over the past decade. The importance of automaticity
carries over to a number of L1 research studies that emphasize the role of
automatic word-recognition skills as a foundation for reading fluency and
reading comprehension.
A final perspective focuses on text-reading fluency training involving
work over 20 years by Breznitz (e.g. 2987, 2001, and 2006) who has
demonstrated that moderately accelerating students’ reading rate improved
heir comprehension of texts. She argued that accelerating reading rates
improved the efficiency of various cognitive processes involved in reading,
particularly with respect to working-memory processes. Breznitz (2006) also
showed that as students become increasingly proficient, they are still able to
achieve reading comprehension benefits from accelerating their reading rates
by 10 percent.
As an interesting counterpoint to Breznitz, a study by Meyer, et al.
(1999) found contrasting results with a group of university level students:
slowing down the rate did not decrease comprehension. Theoretically, the
argument proposes that more advanced readers compensate for weak
component skills in reading, and especially efficiency skills, when they have
enough time to use less efficient alternative processing strategies.
Word-recognition fluency
The role of word-recognition training on fluency and reading
comprehension is more complex. Research on early word-recognition skills
with young L1 readers demonstrates that word-recognition skills are strongly
associated with reading and predict later reading abilities. Two notable
studies, however, have shown that practice in reading words more rapidly had
an impact not only in reading rate of a prose text but also on reading
comprehension of the text.
Other studies have shown that practice in word-recognition speed
impacted word-recognition fluency more generally ad improved fluency in
reading new stories that included many of the trained words. Based on the
research to date, word-recognition-fluency training should not be dismissed
but should be a focus of continuing research.
As a final comment on L1 fluency research, many training research
studies do not match up well with instructional intervention studies. Research
studies often involve relatively short training interventions followed by an
outcome measure. If researchers want to establish relations between fluency
and comprehension, it is far more likely to be found on the basis of extended
training programs over longer periods of time.
L2 perspectives on word-reading fluency
Word-reading fluency gains represent changes in cognitive processing
that can be assessed and help us understand the development of automaticity.
The key to understanding fluency (and automaticity) is to find ways to
measure growth in cognitive fluency. For advanced L2 readers with high
levels of reading ability, automaticity development with word recognition
remained a powerful factor in distinguishing reading fluency.
In follow-up study examining the development of automaticity in French
speakers learning ESL, Segalowitz and Segalowitz (1993) showed that
practice on word-recognition tasks led to faster and more stable (less variable)
responses. The primary pedagogical implications drawn by Segalowitz (2000)
and by Segalowitz and Hulstijn (2005) is that word-recognition fluency can be
developed through extensive repetitions and specificity of encoding.
Two other studies unvolving word-fluency training have been reported
by AKamtsu (2008) and Fukkink, et al. (2005). They results showed that
word-fluency training over two sessions improved reading rate but did not
directly affect reading comprehension results. While the studies reviewed
above examined more mature, literate readers, Geva, et al. (1997) have
focused on younger learners learning to read simultaneously in English (L1)
and Hebrew (L2). They concluded that steps associated with the development
of L1 reading efficiency may be applicable to the development of word
recognition skills in L2, but that these do not emerge concurrently in both
languages.
L2 research on passage-reading fluency
To date, only three studies have been reported on training L2 students to
read passages more fluently. Taguchi and Gorsuch (2002) carried out a second
training study of repeated reading. The results showed that repeated reading
practice led to significant reading-rate improvements; students improved from
84 wpm to 107 wpm, a significant gain of 23 wpm from the beginning to the
end of the training period.
Implications for instruction
Fluency development can be supported by a number of general
instructional practices which include reading-rate development, assisted
reading, repeated reading, timed reading, paced reading, text rereading, word-
recognition exercises, and extensive reading. Instructional practices for
fluency development are most commonly discussed as sets of activities for
elementary L1 students from second to sixth grades. The review of practices
to follow draws primarily on the instruction of L1 elementary-school students,
but these practices are easily adaptable to L2 contexts.
Rasinski (2003) explains many of the better-known fluency instructional
practices under three headings: supported reading, repeated reading, and
performance reading. His framework for fluency instruction assumes extended
practice that usually involves daily reading lessons over a period of two
months or longer.
Supported reading
Rasinski presents numerous supported-reading instructional options: (a)
choral reading, the entire class can read the full text, one student can read a
part and the rest of the class can read other parts; (b) paired reading, a student
can read with the teacher, a tutor, a struggling student from a more advanced
grade, or a better reader from the class; and (c) recorded reading, students can
read text aloud along with the tapes and then on their own after working with
the taped reading of the segment.
Repeated reading
Rasinski reviewed several different types of repeated-reading fluency
practices: (a) repeated-reading practice, involves a student sitting with a
teacher or tutor and rereading a short passage until he or she can reach an
appropriate criterion; (b) radio reading, groups of four to six students read a
text aloud for the class. Students build fluency by practicing their parts for the
group reading the following day; and (c) cooperative repeated reading,
involves students working in pair, one students reads a short passage several
times while the second student assist.
Performance reading
A third major type of reading-fluency practice involves performance
reading, including: (a) student read-alouds, can involve the radio-reading
practice noted earlier as well as the ‘say it like the character’ reading-practice
activity; and (b) readers’ theater, involves the reading of a text as a theater
production.
Integrated fluency activities
Combined sets of fluency practices include: (a) oral supports lessons,
involve any version of a student listening to a skilled reading while reading
aloud along with the skilled reader, and repeating this practice multiple times;
(b) oral recitation lessons, involve teacher modeling, comprehension support,
repeated reading, and student performance of the text; (c) fluency development
lessons, begin with the teacher reading a short text or poem several times; (d)
phrased text lessons, can take 10-15 minutes per day which helps students
who are struggling word-by-word readers.
 In the above sections, many fluency activities have been noted, and
time recommendations have been given in some cases. The goal is to create
a set of consistent practices that blend in well with other reading goals.
Fluency practice in L2 contexts
Anderson (1994, 1999) argues that fluency development is accomplished
through a combination of practice with individual rereading, paired
reading, word-recognition exercises, timed rate-building practice, and
paced reading activities. Rasinski (2003) provides numerous suggestions
for reading for multiple purposes through various types of performance-
reading activities. Similarly, Stoller (2002) offers multiple options,
suggesting several different tasks that can be used to revisit a text for
learning content and developing L2 academic language skills.
Word-recognition fluency
A number of instructional practices are recommended that focus on
rapid practice in word recognition to build word-recognition fluency.
Rasinski (2003) recommends that repeated reading of high-frequency
words and phrases improves fluency. Fry (2000) similarly argues that the
200 most
frequent words should become sight words, recognized effortlessly, since
they cover 65 percent of most lower-level instructional texts. Other
instructional recommendations in L2 contexts include the use of word-
recognition
exercises as a way to raise student awareness of the need for rapid
word recognition in fluent reading.