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EDR8200 Dr. Kelsey

Scholarly Literature Review Develop a Literature Review Draft

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Fluency Development and Low-SES Struggling Readers in the Middle Grades

Daniel Coffin

Northcentral University
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Fluency Development in the Middle Grades: A Review of the Literature

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature related to the topic of fluency development

for struggling readers, especially those of low socioeconomic status (SES) in the middle grades. The

topic of fluency development is of paramount importance for reading teachers as the development of

oral reading fluency is an important precursor to reading comprehension and overall reading

achievement. While there has been a great deal of research conducted on helping students to develop

strong reading skills, a significant number of students in the middle and secondary grades still

demonstrate a serious lack of reading proficiency, and the majority of students who demonstrate

reading deficiencies in the elementary grades show those same deficiencies in high school (Archer,

Gleason, & Vachon, 2010). These, in turn, lead to academic difficulties not only in the language arts

classroom, but in the content classrooms as well, which require strong reading skills in order to access

that content. This suggests that fluency development has not been as effective in the middle grades as it

should be, and that research on fluency development for that population is a worthwhile addition to

literacy education scholarship.

In this literature review, I will review factors influencing student fluency development, the three

dimensions of oral reading fluency, accuracy, automaticity, and prosody, the theoretical framework

explaining why and how fluency development contributes to overall reading performance, assessment

of fluency and effective fluency development interventions which may be adapted for students in the

middle grades.

Effective fluency development interventions for students in the middle grades should target

each of the three dimensions of oral reading fluency, accuracy, automaticity, and prosody, doing so in a

meaningful context which will help to develop oral reading fluency but also student self-efficacy and

interest in reading. While there has been relatively little research on fluency development for typically
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developing students in the middle grades who do not evince academic or behavioral disabilities but

nevertheless struggle to read proficiently, there remains a wealth of information regarding interventions

for primary grade students which may be modified to serve the needs of older students. In order to

improve the reading performance and, thus, the overall academic achievement of struggling middle

grades readers, it is imperative that teachers develop a new paradigm for reading instruction for middle

grades readers targeting those aspects of fluency development which perpetuate reading difficulties in

those student populations.

Socioeconomic Factors Influencing Oral Reading Disfluency

Oral reading fluency refers to the ability of a reader to read aloud without making errors in

decoding, at an appropriate pace, and with meaningful phrasing and intonation. These three aspects are

referred to as accuracy, automaticity, and prosody, respectively, and a reader must develop all three

aspects or fluency deficiencies will be apparent in his or her reading, including frustration with reading

and a failure to comprehend (Paige & Magpuri-Lavell, 2014). Fluency, then, is a mediating factor

between phonics and reading comprehension and an important precursor to overall reading proficiency.

Disfluent reading is marked by inappropriate pauses and breaks in oral reading while readers

attempt to decode text on the fly, frequent errors in word decoding, and either flat affect while

reading aloud or the use of inappropriate tone (e.g., reading a sad or serious text in an upbeat or

happy tone). Extensive research has shown that readers who fail to comprehend while reading also

demonstrate reading disfluency (Hilsmier, Wehby, & Falk, 2016).

Oral reading disfluency is not solely a problem for students with academic and behavioral

disabilities. 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
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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. The question remains, however, as to why

oral reading fluency affects reading comprehension. One theoretical framework which helps to explain

this relationship is cognitive load theory.

Cognitive Load Theory and Reading Performance

Cognitive load theory attempts to explain what happens in the mind of the learner during a

reading event. In any given event, a learner must apprehend, organize, and incorporate information

from the text into their schemas. These processes take place in working memory (Eitel, Kuhl, Scheiter,

& Gerjets, 2014). Working memory is a finite resource and thus the amount of information that can be

retained in working memory during a reading event is limited. If the constraints of working memory

are exceeded by the demands of the text with which a reader is working, the efficiency of a readers

schema may be reduced, inhibiting transfer of information, and some of the information gained from

that text will be lost (Cho, Altarriba, & Popiel, 2015; Sala & Gobet, 2017). A good analogy for this

effect is juggling: tossing and catching one ball is relatively easy, even for a novice, but as additional
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balls are added, the task becomes progressively difficult, and the likelihood grows that something is

going to be dropped. When one considers the reading event in light of this analogy, what is being

juggled, and what is being dropped? All too often, disfluent readers who are able to puzzle through

decoding text do so at the cost of their understanding of the text.

Reading isnt a single event but a process made up of multiple cognitive tasks. Readers must

turn their attention as they read from decoding to considering the relationship between words in a

sentence to considering the relationship of sentences within a paragraph to the relationship of paragraph

to the text as a whole. It is only when students consider the meaning of words in a unified context,

rather than in isolation, that they are able to generate meaning and understand the information being

presented in that text.

As readers become more experienced and more fluent, cognitive resources are freed in working

memory which permit the reader to better attend to relationships between words in a sentence and

sentences in a paragraph, helping them to make meaning of the text and incorporate that information

into their schemas, improving not only comprehension but recall as well (Mikk, 2008). There is a

fluency-comprehension feedback loop as well, as improved comprehension supports improved prosody

and phrasing, which are important aspects of reading fluency.

Accuracy

The first dimension of fluency is accuracy, which refers to the ability of a reader to decode text

without error. Accuracy is an important aspect of oral reading fluency and is the first emphasis in

fluency development instruction because phonetic decoding at a rate of less than 90% is considered to

be frustration level and may result in an inability of a reader to make sense of the text to be read

(Parker, Zaslofsky, Burns, Kanive, Hodgson, Scholin, & Klingbeil, 2015).

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Accuracy in decoding depends on a strong basis in both phonemic awareness and phonics

(Vaessen & Blomert, 2010). Phonemic awareness is a pre-literacy skill which has to do with an

emergent readers ability to discern sounds (phonemes) within a word. Readers who are phonologically

aware know that words are made up of many constituent sounds and can create new words by

identifying and manipulating those sounds (e.g., bat to cat to hat). Phonemic awareness is developed in

large part through song and rhyme (Vaessen & Blomert, 2010).

Phonics develops upon the basis of phonemic awareness. Phonics is an early literacy skill which

has to do with developing phoneme to grapheme, or sound to text, correspondences (e.g., phonemic

awareness is knowing that the word bat is made of the /b/ /a/ /t/ phonemes, while phonics is knowing

that the /b/ phoneme is represented by the letter b, and so on). As students progress through their

early reading education, they learn increasingly complex sound combinations through both drill and

authentic reading (Vaessen & Blomert, 2010).

While decoding, or reading text, and encoding, writing text, are related to each other cognitively

in that each draws upon ones phonemic awareness and recognition of graphemes, they cannot be said

to mere reversals of each other. While some research has suggested that decoding ability is predictive

of spelling and writing ability is predictive of reading comprehension, other studies have shown that the

predictive effect of reading or writing skills is only moderate during early literacy, and diminishing

further as readers mature and tackle more orthographically complex text (Ahmed, Wagner, & Lopez,

2014). Furthermore, studies of oral reading fluency in languages other than English have indicated

slight or no correlation between decoding ability and reading comprehension; this suggests that the

importance of decoding to overall reading performance is relative to the orthographic complexity of the

language in which the reading occurs (Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2014).
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For our purposes, though, we can say that without accurate decoding of text, reading cannot

occur. It is not enough, however, for students to be able to decode accurately if they are to read

successfully. They must also be able to do so in a timely fashion.

Automaticity

The ability of a reader to access a whole word or word part from their memory in order to read

without pausing to struggle with decoding is automaticity, an aspect of fluency which develops upon

readers proficiency with phonics decoding (Paige & Magpuri-Lavell, 2014). In early readers, decoding

depends strongly on phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge, but with repeated exposure to print,

readers gradually build up an internal inventory of words of increasing orthographical complexity; this

inventory of sight words, which do not need to be decoded phoneme by phoneme, but are recognized as

a whole, enables readers to read more quickly without sacrificing accuracy (Vaessen & Blomert, 2010).

Research suggests that by the end of the 6th grade, the role of phonetic decoding in reading has

declined, and by high school, that effect disappears altogether (van Steensel, Oostdam, van Gelderen,

van Schooten, 2014). This would suggest that following primary school, most readers either have

become fluent or have developed compensatory skills to make up for a lack of fluency. It must be

remembered however, that while decoding appears to be more important in early literacy than in later

stages, students who have delays or deficits in literacy learning (like the aforementioned students of

lower socioeconomic status) may still be in those early literacy stages later in their school career than is

typical, and so decoding may still have a place in a middle grades reading curriculum for these

students.

Decoding with automaticity reduces the cognitive load placed upon the reader while reading

because working memory is not being used to decode text. The cognitive resources which would have
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been exhausted decoding are now free to attend to relationships between words in a sentence rather

than within the word itself, enabling meaning-making (Mikk, 2008).

This, more so than any other aspect of fluency, helps to explain why fluency development is such an

important precursor to reading comprehension and overall reading performance.

This is not to suggest, however, that cognitive load in and of itself is a bad thing, or that speed

in decoding is necessarily an unvarnished good. In fact, research has suggested that there is a

disfluency effect in that text which is perceived by a reader to be harder to understand may serve as a

cue to attend to the text deliberately and analytically; this germane cognitive load (GCL) may serve as

a desirable difficulty which improves recall and comprehension (Eitel, Kuhl, Scheiter, & Gerjets,

2014). As such, automaticity in decoding should be viewed in the whole context of the reading event

and its purpose. A narrative text read for pleasure and an expository text read for academic purposes,

even when of comparable length and complexity, must necessarily be read differently, with varying

degree of attention to detail.

Prosody

The third and final facet of fluency is prosody, the ability of a reader to read aloud with

meaningful phrasing and intonation (Paige & Magpuri-Lavell, 2014). Reading that is not prosodic

sounds monotone or choppy, which makes text hard to follow and understand; reading text aloud in a

way that approximates natural speech, conversely, aids in comprehension (Rasinski, Rupley, &

Nichols, 2008).

Reading prosody conveys to a listener not only information from within the text but

circumstantial information as well through the use of pitch, stress, tone, and word boundaries

(Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2014). An example of the influence of pitch would be a rising

inflection at the ending of a sentence indicating an interrogative, while the placement of stress on a
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particular word in a sentence communicates the especial importance of that word to an overall message.

Tone can be used to convey attitude, as in sarcasm or irony, while the use of word boundaries, such as

those following a list within a sentence, help to communicate breaks between word units in a sentence

and is correlated with phrasing and word chunking reading skills (Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven,

2014).

Research supports the idea of a bidirectional relationship between reading prosody and

comprehension. Reading prosody assists readers in assigning syntactic roles to words within sentences

and segmenting sentences into meaningful phrases; these phrases may be easier to recall and

comprehend than full sentences due to decreased cognitive load (Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven,

2016). Conversely, prosody can serve as a reflection of a readers comprehension of a text. A readers

intuition of how a piece of text should be read and the assignment of circumstantial information to that

text through pitch, tone, stress, and word boundaries can only be derived from an understanding of the

meaning the author has encoded in the text (Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2016). Thus, improved

reading prosody leads to improved comprehension, which in turn informs the manner in which a reader

performs the oral reading of a text (Rasinski, Rupley, & Nichols, 2008).

Assessment of Oral Reading Fluency

Accuracy and automaticity of text are generally assessed by means of words correct per minute

(WCPM); curriculum-based measurement (CBM) data collection can be used to measure the effect of

fluency development interventions on reader accuracy and speed (Ardoin, Christ, Morena, Cormier, &

Klingbeil, 2011).
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Measures of reading speed are frequently used not just to assess the efficacy of reading fluency

interventions, but also to measure overall reading performance and screen students for potential reading

deficiencies and/or disabilities. However, studies indicating only slight correlation between reading

speed and reading comprehension suggest that these measures are not valid as indicators of reading

performance for more experienced readers (Wallot, OBrien, Haussmann, Kloos, & Lyby, 2014). For

example, a student who reads a given text slowly might be doing so because of careful rereading and

reflection during the reading event, which is indicative of reading skill and supportive of reading

comprehension, while a student reading the same text quickly might be doing so without attending to

important details, leading to impaired comprehension. Furthermore, there is research suggesting, as

mentioned previously, that excessive reading speed engendered by a focus on automaticity training

might impair reading comprehension.

This has spurred debate among teachers and researchers as to whether replacing reading speed

with other measures of performance might more accurately predict reading performance on

standardized assessments (Baker, Biancarosa, Park, Bousselot, Smith, Baker, Kameenui, Alonzo, &

Tindal, 2015). One potential solution is to measure not just speed of reading but speed within the

context of relative text complexity, but additional research is needed to examine how complexity at the

level of word, sentence, and text affect reading speed and to disambiguate reading speed as a reading

process measure and reading speed as a reading outcome measure (Wallot, OBrien, Haussmann,

Kloos, & Lyby, 2014).

Another approach is to examine other aspects of fluency. Reading prosody, in particular, is a

valuable measure for teachers because research has shown that reading prosody explained variance in

reading comprehension scores, even when decoding efficiency and oral language comprehension skills

were controlled for (Veenendaal, Groen, & Verhoeven, 2015). Reading prosody of reading can be
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measured using a multidimensional rubric like Rasinskis which assesses pacing, tone, volume, and

phrasing; these scores can also be gathered and analyzed using CBM (cited in Meisinger, Bloom, &

Hynd, 2008).

Fluency Development Interventions

When diagnostic measures and anecdotal observations have indicated that a reader has an oral

reading fluency deficiency, there are a number of interventions which can be employed to improve oral

reading fluency which have been shown through research to be effective for early readers in the

primary grades. The aforementioned decreased effect of automaticity of decoding for more experienced

readers would suggest that a traditional phonics drill routine would not be profitable for students, in

addition to doing nothing to increase student motivation to read. Thankfully, there are a number of

high-interest and authentic fluency intervention techniques which can be adapted for use in the middle

grades reading classroom (Leko, 2015).

Repeated reading is an intervention in which readers practice with a piece of text over an

extended period of time. This intervention may incorporate a corrective feedback component as well

where a teacher provides readers with immediate error correction of mispronounced words in order to

improve word recognition and decoding (Sukhram & Monda-Amaya, 2017). Repeated reading has

been shown to be effective in significantly improving reader speed, accuracy of decoding, and

comprehension in both narrative and expository texts; these gains have also been shown to transfer

from a practice text to overall reading performance (Paige & Magpuri-Lavell, 2014).

Readers theater is an instructional technique in which readers perform a script by reading aloud.

Readers theater does not require props, costumes, or sets, and can easily be implemented within the

classroom space with minimal preparation beforehand. Readers theater helps to develops all three

dimensions of fluency by giving repeated reading a meaningful context through rehearsal of a script,
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and inviting readers to develop prosody by placing themselves in the emotional space of characters

and conveying circumstantial information through the use of tone, pitch, and stress. (Young &

Nageldinger, 2014). Readers theater is especially effective as an intervention as it is a high-interest

activity for students; the performance aspect of the intervention harnesses student desire to entertain

their peers, and scripts for performance can be derived from books, movies, and television shows that

students enjoy. Teachers can make the experience even more memorable and meaningful by inviting

parents, peers, and other educators to serve as an audience; the presence of an audience serves as a cue

to students to attend more carefully to their performance (Noltemeyer, Joseph, & Watson, 2014).

Poetry recitation, like readers theater, leverages the aspects of rehearsal and performance to

provide a high-interest and meaningful context for repeated reading and the use of vocal inflection to

communicate meaning. Like drama, poetry is literature which is meant to be read aloud for the

appreciation of an audience. One aspect of this intervention that serves struggling readers well is that it

provides them with a safe place to practice short texts which emphasize communication of meaning

rather than grammatical structure (Wilfong, 2015). This activity can be modified to give students an

opportunity to rehearse and deliver speeches, whether classic texts retrieved from the Internet, or

students own compositions (Young & Nageldinger, 2014).

Conclusion

In summary, oral reading disfluency is a serious academic impediment which can give rise to

overall diminished reading performance. A lack of reading proficiency in the middle grades can have

serious consequences for students both within the language arts classroom and in other content classes

which require proficient reading, up to and including failure to graduate.

In spite of the prevailing paradigm for middle grades language arts education which presumes

the acquisition of developmentally appropriate oral reading fluency in the elementary grades, teachers
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of middle grades language arts, and especially those serving populations of lower socioeconomic status

and English language learner students, should begin to more widely incorporate fluency development

instruction into the regular language arts classroom. A middle grades language arts curriculum which

delivers vocabulary and comprehension instruction alone is not sufficient to enable disfluent readers to

learn to read proficiently at grade level.

The means to incorporate fluency development into the regular language arts classroom exists

already. A number of fruitful interventions for developing fluency exist, such as repeated reading with

corrective feedback, readers theater, and poetry performance, which have the promise of being adapted

to serve middle grade students as well as they do elementary developing readers.

It is imperative that middle grades language arts and reading teachers educate themselves on the

effects of disfluency and fluency development instruction in order to give struggling readers their best

chance for reading proficiency before frustration and disaffection with reading reach critical levels in

the later middle and secondary grades. In particular, teachers of middle grades language arts should

become proficient with the use of diagnostic assessments to identify disfluent readers in a timely

fashion so that interventions can be delivered speedily.

Moving forward, additional research is needed on the degree to which each aspect of oral

reading fluency explains variance in reading comprehension, the effect of text complexity at multiple

levels (e.g. word, sentence, and whole text) on oral reading speed and comprehension, the role of

phonetic decoding and reading speed in the middle grades for typically developing students, and the

efficacy of interventions designed for emergent and early readers which have been modified for use

with middle grades readers. Armed with this knowledge, teachers can help to ensure that students who

have missed out on the help they needed in the elementary grades can get it before it is too late.
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