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EDU8001 Dr. Karen Hjerpe

Advanced Scholarly Writing Conduct a Literature Review

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

Ross Downin

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 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
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development for typically 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
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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. 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
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reader is working, the efficiency of a reader’s 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 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 isn’t 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
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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).

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 reader’s 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 one’s 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
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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).

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
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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 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).

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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 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).

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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).

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, O’Brien,

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, Kame’enui,

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
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reading speed as a reading process measure and reading speed as a reading outcome measure

(Wallot, O’Brien, 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 measured using a multidimensional rubric like Rasinski’s 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,
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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, 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
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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 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
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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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References

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Young, C., & Nageldinger, J. (2014). Considering the context and texts for fluency:
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