Reviews the literature concerning oral reading fluency and offers six hypotheses about how beginning readers develop oral fluency and about strategies to help those who do not. (FL)

Reports that in a word naming experiment, experienced readers of Persian named high frequency transparent Persian words significantly faster than matched low frequency words. Finds no such effects for adults who had, for 10 years, little experience in reading Persian due to emigration to the West; overall, previously experienced adults named words…

Reprints a reading classic, originally published in this journal in 1979. Describes the method of repeated readings, discussing the procedure, comprehension, and theoretical rationale. Compares it with music and sports and notes how versions of this method were used in early schooling. (SR)

A brief experimental analysis of four instructional strategies was administered to 5 children referred for remedial reading services. Assessment isolated a single, effective strategy for each child. Alternating treatment designs were then employed to assess the differential effects of the selected strategy across time and on repeated measures of…

Discusses an integrated theory of literacy development with synchrony between beginning stages of reading and spelling. Explores the reasons why beginning readers read disfluently, fingerpoint, and read aloud. Discusses orthographic correlates to these behaviors. Suggests that fluent reading must wait for a certain power in word knowledge.…

Argues that educators must address the challenge of helping all students read fluently. Presents strategies to improve student performance in reading speed, accuracy, and the ability to chunk meaning into units or gists. Advises teachers to encourage students to increase reading speed as they encounter an unfamiliar word, use repeated readings,…

Experimental analyses for improving reading fluency deficits have rarely targeted generalized increases in academic responding. As a consequence, the variables that may help students to generalize newly learned forms of academic responding like reading are not well understood. Furthermore, experimental analyses of reading fluency interventions…

Research has shown fluency plays a vital role in learning. Precision Teaching, a method for measuring behavior and facilitating decision-making, has demonstrated it can benefit teachers interested in fostering fluency. Through the use of a systematic practice routine derived from Precision Training, teachers can apply a method that efficiently…

Research has consistently demonstrated that strategic preteaching activities led to improved reading fluency, but lacked studies examining the effect on reading comprehension. The current study investigated the effect of teaching unknown key words as a preteaching strategy with 20 students identified as learning disabled in basic reading skills…

This article proposes that visual encoding learning improves reading fluency by widening the span over which letters are recognized from a fixated text image so that fewer fixations are needed to cover a text line. Encoder is a connectionist model that learns to convert images like the fixated text images human readers encode into the…

The purpose of this practice brief is to provide schools, districts, and states with background knowledge about best practices for older students who struggle to read. It focuses on the reading skills that adolescents need to more fully access content-area curricula and, in turn, secure a productive future. The authors define adolescent reading as…

The 2007-08 Annual Report presents and analyzes the performance of students in Nebraska Reading First schools during the 2007-08 school year. Teacher log information is also presented, and a district performance comparison is made from the year just previous to Reading First implementation across the four years of implementation. [This report was…

Parents and caregivers can play an important role in helping their at-risk children improve their reading skills. Parents generally want to be part of their children's academic achievement, but may not always know the most appropriate or effective way to contribute. Teachers encourage at-risk students to read consistently at home and supportive…

There is a large collection of students who experience difficulty with the development of reading fluency and comprehension. Many students receive little to no benefit from non-systematic instructional methods. In order to become proficient readers many students need explicit instruction in fluency to serve as a building block to comprehension.…

This article explores similarities in literacy learning across various life-span stages and considers what actions must be taken to improve literacy attainment and achievement, whether the delivery site is prekindergarten, elementary, secondary, adult, family, workplace, volunteer, or community literacy. The emphasis here is on what it takes to…