Texts classified according to guided reading levels (GRL) are ubiquitous in U.S. beginning reading classrooms. This study examined features of texts across three grade bands (kindergarten, early first grade, final first grade) and the 10 GRLs within these bands. The 510 texts came from three programs with different functions in beginning reading instruction: core, intervention, and content areas. Text features were decoding, semantics, structure, and syntax from the Early Literacy Indicators system, mean sentence length (MSL) and mean log word frequency (MLWF) from the Lexile Framework, and word count. Five variables predicted GRLs of texts: semantics, structure, syntax, MSL, and word count. Differences in decoding and MLWF across grade bands were few and neither variable predicted levels of texts. Intervention texts had lower decoding and MLWF demands than core or content-area texts. Implications of a lack of discernible progressions in decoding and MLWF are discussed.

This study showed that learning to read by sounding out words (a teaching method known as phonics) has a dramatic impact on the accuracy of reading aloud and comprehension. Researchers tested whether learning to read by sounding out words is more effective than focusing on whole-word meanings. In order to assess the effectiveness of using phonics the researchers trained adults to read in a new language, printed in unfamiliar symbols, and then measured their learning with reading tests and brain scans. The results were striking; people who had focused on the meanings of the new words were much less accurate in reading aloud and comprehension than those who had used phonics, and the MRI scans revealed that their brains had to work harder to decipher what they were reading. Results suggest that early literacy education should focus on the systematicities present in print-to-sound relationships in alphabetic languages, rather than teaching meaning-based strategies, in order to enhance both reading aloud and comprehension of written words.

Teachers, parents and textbook companies use technical "readability" formulas to determine how difficult reading materials are and to set reading levels by age group. This study from North Carolina State University shows that the readability formulas are usually inaccurate and offer little insight into which age groups will be able to read and understand a text. In the study, 360 students (grades 2-5) read six written passages out loud. The researchers assessed the students’ performance, giving each student an "oral reading fluency" score, which is considered a good metric for measuring reading ability. The researchers then used eight different readability formulas to see which level each formula gave to the six written passages. Results varied widely, with one passage being rated from first grade to fifth grade level. The levels assigned by the readability formulas were then compared with researchers’ assessments of each student’s actual ability to read the material. Seven of the eight readability formulas were less than 49 percent accurate, with the worst formula scoring only 17 percent accuracy. The highest-rated formula was accurate 79 percent of the time.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), about fifty percent of low-income fourth graders in our nation's schools are unable to read at a basic level. In this report, Brown University's Marilyn Jager Adams, a pioneer in literacy research and practice, points to evidence that speech recognition technology — which is widely used in telephone call-routing and directory assistance — can be tapped as a cost-effective and technically viable means to advance early childhood literacy, particularly fluency. When coupled with effective pedagogy, voice recognition tools can provide valuable assessments that reach beyond the human capacities of the average public school classroom teacher. Adams argues that this emerging technology has the potential to offer real-time literacy support to every student by helping young children learn reading with the fluency needed to compete and cooperate in an increasingly complex age.

Silent reading seems like a good idea since it gives students additional practice. Round Robin seems like a good idea since it focuses the class on oral reading. But increasing fluency requires more practice, more support, and more guided oral reading than either of these strategies can deliver. This article cuts through the buzz around fluency and review what reading fluency is, why it is essential to ensure that our students have sufficient fluency, how fluency should be assessed, and how to best provide fluency practice and support for our students.

Fluent reading, often defined as speed and accuracy, is an important skill for all readers to develop. Students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle to read fluently, leading to difficulties in reading comprehension. Despite recent attention to reading fluency and ways to improve fluency, it is not clear which features of interventions that are designed to enhance fluency are beneficial for the most struggling readers. The purpose of this study is to synthesize research on interventions that are designed primarily to build reading fluency for students with LD. The search yielded 24 published and unpublished studies that reported findings on intervention features, including repeated reading with and without a model, sustained reading, number of repetitions, text difficulty, and specific improvement criteria. Our findings suggest that effective interventions for building fluency include an explicit model of fluent reading, multiple opportunities to repeatedly read familiar text independently and with corrective feedback, and established performance criteria for increasing text difficulty.

As phoneme awareness deficits and resulting decoding weaknesses are increasingly addressed, there is heightened awareness of the role of fluency in reading. This paper reviews the history of fluency training, discusses the theoretical bases of such training, and summarizes the current knowledge about the efficacy of training procedures. It focuses on Repeated Reading (RR), the most familiar and researched approach to fluency training. Outcome data on Repeated Reading, presented in the form of questions, is meant to answer practitioner's questions about implementation and efficacy and to provide a starting point for researchers interested in the topic. Although some answers are straightforward, others indicate the subtleties involved in answering the broad question: Does Repeated Reading work? In addition to a list of practical suggestions based on Repeated Readings findings, three new approaches to fluency training are introduced.

This study investigated whether improved fluency and comprehension across different stories in repeated reading depend on the degree of word overlap among passages and whether repeated reading is more effective than an equivalent amount of nonrepetitive reading. Non-fluent, learning disabled students read passages presented and timed by a computer under three different conditions. Results suggest that over short periods of time, increases in reading speed with the repeated reading method depend on the amount of shared words among stories, and that if stories have few shared words, repeated reading is not more effective for improving speed than an equivalent amount of nonrepetitive reading.

The speed and accuracy with which 56 skilled or less skilled readers read words in and out of context was assessed in the fall and spring of the 1st grade by having both groups read random lists of words and coherent paragraphs. The context of the coherent paragraph facilitated word recognition performance to a greater degree in the spring than in the fall, and this developmental trend was similar for both groups. Although the word recognition performance of the skilled readers was superior to that of the less skilled readers on the coherent paragraphs, the former were also better at reading random lists of words. Data indicate that the less skilled readers were getting as much contextual facilitation from the coherent paragraph as were the skilled readers when the latter were at a similar level of context-free decoding ability. This finding, combined with other research, indicates that less skilled readers of this age perform relatively poorly on coherent paragraphs because of poor decoding skills, not because of a strategic inability to use context to facilitate word recognition.