Improving Readers' Uency in EFL Using Repeated Reading: January 2014

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Improving readers' ﬂuency in EFL using repeated reading
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Hegazy, M. & Adel Latif, M. M. (2014). Improving readers' fluency in EFL using repeated reading. In H.
Emery & N. Moore (Eds.), Teaching, learning and researching reading in EFL, pp. 110-127. Dubai: TESOL
Arabia Publications.
Improving Readers' Fluency in EFL Using Repeated Reading
Dr Marwa Fouad Hegazy Dr Muhammad M. M. Abdel Latif

National Center for Educational Research Institute of Educational Studies, Cairo
and Development, Egypt University, Egypt
ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on a study that examined how a repeated reading intervention can improve
Egyptian prep school students’ reading fluency. Two groups of prep school students in Egypt
received different types of reading instruction. While the control group received traditional
reading instruction, the experimental one received repeated reading training that targeted
developing three aspects of the students' reading fluency (reading accuracy, reading rate, and
reading prosody). The two groups were tested in the three aspects of reading fluency before and
after the intervention. The results indicated that the experimental group students outperformed
the control group ones in the three reading fluency aspects. The chapter discusses these results
and presents implications for designing fluency-oriented repeated reading instruction.
Introduction
Reading fluency has taken a front seat in the literature of student reading development and
effective reading instruction. After years of neglect, fluency has been increasingly recognized as
a necessary element in student's successful reading development (Rasiniski, 2003). Fluency is
one of the defining characteristics of good readers, and dysfluency is a common characteristic of
poor readers (Hudson, Lane & Pullen, 2005). Differences in reading fluency not only distinguish
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good readers from poor ones, but a lack of reading fluency is also a predictor of reading
comprehension problems (Stanovich, 1991). The crucial role fluency plays in successful reading
performance is highlighted in two well-known theories: automaticity theory (LaBerg & Samuels,
1974) and verbal efficiency theory (Prefetti, 1985). Automaticity theory positing that reading
becomes more efficient due to the development of automaticity in decoding skills, thus allowing
limited attentional resources to be reallocated to higher level reading comprehension processes.
On the other hand, Perfetti’s verbal efficiency theory proposes that efficient decoding of words is
a prerequisite to successful text comprehension, but it argues that post-lexical reading processes
(i.e., processes after decoding) can be automatized as well, and that its automatization plays a
decisive role in fluent reading comprehension. According to Morisoli (2010), the two theories
emphasize that (a) word decoding and reading comprehension are separate and sequential
processes, (b) word decoding skills are strongly associated with reading comprehension ones,
and (c) difficulties in automatic word recognition significantly influence one's ability to
comprehend the text.
Reading fluency is an amorphous construct and it has no agreed-upon definition. Breznitz
(2008) points out that reading fluency definitions are of three separate positions: the first views
reading fluency as an outcome of oral reading quality, the second conceptualizes it as an
outcome of accuracy and automaticity development, and the third regards it as an outcome of the
effectiveness of some biological and cognitive processes. With these different
conceptualizations, various definitions of reading fluency have occurred. For example, Samuels
(2006) defined fluent reading as "the ability to decode and to comprehend the text at the same
time" (p. 9). Grabe (2009), on the other hand, defines it as "the ability to read rapidly with ease
and accuracy, and to read with appropriate expression and phrasing" (p, 72). The authors of this
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chapter adopt Grabe's definition which concurs with current research perspectives of reading
fluency. This definition is supported by Hudson et al. (2005) who state that fluent reading is
congruently viewed as encompassing three key elements: accurate reading of connected text at a
conversational rate with appropriate prosody or expression.
By proposing their automaticity theory, LaBerge and Samuels (1974) brought fluency to
the forefront as an important component in reading performance and stimulated researchers'
interest in investigating it. Grabe (2010) reported that reading fluency research conducted since
the 1970s can generally be classified into two major categories: a) comparison studies assessing
individual differences among readers or groups in word recognition and oral text reading skills,
and the factors accounting for these differences; and b) experimental or interventional studies
using different training techniques to develop readers' fluency.
Despite the above-mentioned importance of reading fluency, Nation (2009) points out
that "fluency development is often neglected in courses, partly because teachers and learners feel
that they should always be learning something new. Fluency development involves making the
best use of what is already known" (p. 2). It is noteworthy, however, that comparison studies of
word recognition and oral text reading skills far exceed in number the experimental studies
aiming at developing readers' fluency. Noted also is the vast majority experimental studies were
mainly conducted in L1 reading contexts (see for example Grabe, 2010; Wexler, Vaughn,
Edmonds & Reutebuch, 2007). This calls for conducting more experimental studies for
developing L2 readers' fluency.
Repeated reading is a reading fluency development technique that was introduced by
Samuels (1979) and includes re-reading a short text silently or orally in order to foster readers'
sight recognition of words and phrases until they are able to read it easily (Wexler et al., 2007).
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The ultimate goal of using repeated reading is bringing about gains in readers' fluency and
transferring this improvement to other reading tasks (Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass & Gorsuch,
2004). Repeated reading training can be conducted with or without a model (Wexler et al.,
2007). Repeated reading with a model involves having students listen to a good reading model
(e.g., teacher, peer, audio-recorded material) of a text prior to reading it independently a number
of times. Repeated reading without a model involves getting students to read a text
independently a number of times without having the text modeled prior to reading it. Previous
research has provided accumulated evidence suggesting that repeated reading can be an effective
technique for developing readers' fluency. The four meta-analyses reported by Chard Vaughn,
and Tyler (2002), Therrien (2004), Wexler et al. (2007) and Grabe (2010) indicate that repeated
reading interventions led to improvement in students' reading fluency. Most of the studies
reviewed in these reports, however, involved primary graders (e.g., Meyer & Felton, 1999; Wolf
& Katzir-Cohen, 2001). On the other hand, reading fluency studies in the Egyptian context are
very scarce. Contrarily to the L2/L1 studies reviewed in the above mentioned meta-analysis
reports, these scarce studies (e.g., El-Garawany, 2010; Mostafa, 2010) were found to deal with
developing university English majors'- i.e., student teachers of English- reading fluency. It can
be argued that the previous related studies, either at the international level or the Egyptian one,
neglected finding out how repeated reading can improve upper graders'- i.e. prep and secondary
school students- fluency.
Reading fluency skills are particularly important to upper graders who are required to
comprehend increasingly complex texts (Wexler et al., 2007) and have to keep up with longer
texts written at challenging levels (Swanson & Hoskyn, 2001). Thus, improving upper graders'
fluency can help them become independent readers. Taken the research gap referred to above
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into account, the present study investigated how a repeated reading intervention facilitates
Egyptian prep school students’ reading fluency. The study tried to answer the following research
question: how far is repeated reading instruction compared to tradition reading instruction
effective in developing prep school EFL students’ reading fluency (i.e. reading rate, accuracy
and prosody sub-skills)?
Congruent with Nation's (2009) above-mentioned view about the negligence of reading
fluency development in courses, the textbook reading activities studied by the students in the
target context completely ignore completely their oral reading fluency skills. They give no
attention to fostering students' rate of reading, developing their reading accuracy, and improving
their prosody. Accordingly, this study will have important implications for teaching reading in
such context. In addition to addressing the target research areas in a neglected context, the
importance of this study also stems from that it may provide guidelines for how to better design
repeated reading interventions targeting the development of readers' fluency. In the next section,
a description of the method of the study is given.
Method
Design of the Study
The present study is quasi-experimental. It employed the non-equivalent group design which is
the most commonly used quasi-experimental one. It is identical to the pretest-posttest control
group/experimental group design in all aspects except it lacks the key element of randomization.
This design has been criticized for the lack of randomization in assigning participants to the
different treatments, thus threatening the internal validity of the experimentation, but the
potential problems resulting from this lack of randomization can be overcome by determining
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pretest differences. Mohr (1982) states that "true experimental designs are frequently either
infeasible or undesirable and other quasi-experimental designs have only quite limited
applications" (p. 53).
Participants
The sample of the study consisted of 62 participants who were second year prep school female
students at the time of conducting the study. The 62 participants were attending a prep school in
Sharkia Governorate, Egypt, and their ages ranged from thirteen to fourteen years. They were
taken from two intact classes at the same school and divided into two groups (32 students in the
experimental group and 30 students in the control group). All the students in the two groups
started learning English as a foreign language in primary one. This sample is regarded as
representative of students attending governmental prep schools in Egypt, and it was selected
from a school in which the first author had to do some of her job requirements. In the second
year of the prep stage, these students had five English classes each week, and each class lasts for
45 minutes. They were studying part two of the Hello! English for Preparatory Schools series;
this part consists of 24 units each of which has a reading lessons along with other 4 lessons
covering listening, grammar, vocabulary, and communication.
Reading fluency measure and training materials
Reading fluency measure
The study used as a pre-post measure of the students' reading fluency. The measure includes
guidelines for scoring students' reading rate and accuracy- adapted from Good, Kaminski and
Dills's (2002) DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency scoring guidelines- and a rating scale for
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evaluating students' prosody skills- adapted from Zutell & Rasiniski's (1991) Multidimensional
Fluency Scale. In order to examine the students' oral reading performance, three texts were used
with the measure: two narrative texts and an expository one (total = 3). The three texts were of
comparable length (136, 148 and 165 words) and their readability levels ranged from 3.21 to
4.47 according to Dale-Chall (1948) formula, i,e. from very easy to easy according to Flesch's
(1948) formula. Overall, the readability level of these texts matched the readability level of the
reading texts in part two of the Hello! English for Preparatory Schools series. The fluency
measure focused on the following three aspects:
- Reading rate: the student's speed of oral reading. Since the reading rate is calculated by
identifying the number of correct words read per minute, it mainly depends on the students'
reading accuracy. In other words, the reading rate is calculated by subtracting errors from the
whole number of words read per minute.
- Reading accuracy: the student's ability to avoid the oral errors made while reading. The
accuracy aspects measured include: reading without hesitation or struggle, reading without
omitting words, reading without substitution, and reading with correct pronunciation.
- Reading Prosody: the student's feeling and expression of the text while reading it. The
prosody aspects measured include: chunking words of sentences into meaningful segments
with actual cues or slashes, following punctuation marks while reading, using the appropriate
vocal tone in narrative text or dialogues to represent character's mental states (excitement,
sadness, fear, confidence,….etc), and using the appropriate intonation while reading.
Accordingly, the student's reading accuracy and rate were measured through counting the
errors she makes and the number of correct words she reads per minute. In the other hand, her
reading prosody skills were assessed through a rubric for rating her phrasing, punctuation, vocal
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tone, and intonation. The reading fluency measure in its initial form was piloted and was also
validated by a number of expert researchers, and slight modifications were made to it based on
their views. The reading fluency measurement set is composed of: a) scoring guide for the
examiner to facilitate the process of assessing the student's reading performance related to rate,
accuracy and prosody (see appendix one), and b) a scoring sheet for each student to facilitate the
process of recording the following points in each passage:
 Description for the student's errors she made while reading in a table.
 The total number of words the student read per minute.
 The number of errors the student made per minute.
 The number of correct words the student read per minute.
 Rating of the student's reading prosody skills (phrasing, punctuation, vocal tone and
intonation).
Reading fluency training materials
A set of repeated-reading-based training materials was used in the present study to develop the
students' reading fluency aspects (reading rate, accuracy and prosody). These materials were
developed based on reviewing previous related literature (e.g., Dowhower, 1989, Zutell &
Rasiniski, 1991; Good et al. 2002; Rasiniski, 2004; McBride, 2005). Several pedagogical
considerations were taken into account when selecting the reading fluency training materials and
designing their instructional procedures, including: providing students with explicit explanation
about the elements of reading fluency, modeling fluent reading performance, guiding students'
oral reading practice with appropriately challenging and varied texts on a regular basis, guiding
their repeated and multiple re-readings of the text, assessing their reading fluency progress, and
providing them with genuine opportunities for oral reading performance. Thus, the guidelines for
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designing the training procedures are: brief regular practice and repeated reading of texts,
consistency in text context and controlled text difficulty, teacher-modeled text reading and
audio-taped modeled reading, and identifying fluency performance criterion levels. The reading
fluency training materials used consisted of ten reading texts of various types (narrative (n = 6),
expository (n = 3), dialogue and poetry (n = 1). The variance in the number of text types was
mainly based on prep stage students' familiarity with each genre. To decide upon the time needed
for implementing the activities and their suitability to the target population, the first author
piloted two lessons from the materials in their initial form with 5 students who were not included
in the final sample of the study. The instructional scenarios included presenting lists of the most
600 high frequency words at the very beginning of the intervention. Using these lists of words
aimed at helping the students identify instantly these words as their first step towards becoming
fluent readers because of the widespread presence of these words. The training materials in their
initial draft were also submitted to some expert researchers for validation, and were modified in
light of their views and the results of the pilot study.
Data collection procedures
The study was conducted in the first year of the academic year 2011-2012. The study started by
administering the pre-assessment of reading fluency to the students in the experimental and
control groups. An individual testing session was conducted for each student, and involved
getting her to read the three texts orally. The student's oral reading performance was audio-
recorded for in-depth evaluation purposes after the session. Following all sessions, the students'
performance was scored against the three reading fluency aspects (reading rate, accuracy and
prosody) by using the scoring guide and scoring sheet while listening several times to the audio-
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recorded data. The same measurement format and procedures were followed when administering
the post-assessment of reading fluency.
After administering the reading fluency pre-assessment to experimental and control
groups, the two groups received different types of reading instruction. The experimental group
students were taught by the first author, while the control group was taught by another teacher.
The reading fluency training provided to the experimental group consisted of ten lessons, each of
which was taught in five classes (time of each class = 45 minutes) per week over a period of ten
weeks. Thus, the repeated reading training lasted for fifty classes over a period of ten weeks.
Each repeated reading lesson included four main phases: pre-modeling phase, modeling phase,
assisted practice phase and independent reading phase. One class was allocated to teaching each
phrases except for the last one (independent reading phase) which were taught in two classes.
During the assisted and independent repeated readings of the text, the students received
corrective feedback. All the data obtained from the students' oral readings of the texts were
graphed to facilitate visual observation of their reading fluency progress. On the other hand, the
control group received traditional reading instruction. The teacher followed the procedures
described in the Teacher's Guide of part two of the Hello! English for Preparatory Schools
series: introducing the lesson to students, asking them to read the text silently, testing their
reading comprehension, etc..
After providing the two types of reading instruction to the experimental and control
group, and conducting the pre- and post-assessment of the two groups' reading performance, the
data collected was analyzed. The data analysis aimed at identifying any potential effects of
repeated reading versus traditional reading instruction on developing students' reading fluency.
In what follows, the results of the data analysis are provided.
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Results
As has been mentioned above, determining pretest differences was necessary to overcome any
potential problems threatening the internal validity of the experimentation due to lack of
randomization in the non-equivalent group design. The paired sample T-test was used, therefore,
to examine any differences in reading fluency between the two groups prior to the intervention.
Table (1) shows the scores of students in the two groups on the pre-measure of reading fluency.
Table (1): scores of the two groups' on the pre-measure of reading fluency
Reading Sig.
groups M SD D.F. T. Value
fluency aspect
Reading rate Experimental group 5.25 2.51 Not
60 0.393
Control group 5.00 2.49 significant
Reading Experimental group 7.53 2.51 Not
60 1.00
accuracy Control group 4.90 2.40 significant
Reading Experimental group 16.50 4.61 Not
60 1.172
prosody Control group 17.63 2.70 significant
As can be noted, the reading fluency scores of the students in both the experimental and
control group are generally low. The reading rate and accuracy mean scores of the experimental
group students are higher than those of the control group students, while the latter group had
higher reading prosody scores than the former one. However, the T. values of these mean
differences in reading rate (.393), accuracy (1) and prosody (1.721), are not significant. This
means that there were no statistically significant pre-experimentation differences between the
students in the two groups in any aspect of reading fluency performance. Thus, the students in
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the two groups were approximately at the same level of oral reading fluency prior to
experimentation.
The paired sample T-test was used to examine the effect of the reading instruction the
students in the two groups received on their reading fluency performance. Table (2) provides the
scores of the two groups on the post-measure of reading fluency. As the table shows, the
experimental group had higher mean scores of reading rate, accuracy and prosody (means = 9.53,
12 and 37.34, respectively) than the control group (means = 4.90, 7.03 and 16.50, respectively).
Table (2): scores of the two groups' on the post-measure of reading fluency
Reading Sig.
Groups M SD D.F. T. Value Effect Size
fluency aspect
Reading rate Experimental group 9.53
2.51 Significant 1.9
60 7.412 at 0.01
Control group
4.90 2.40 level Large
Reading Experimental group
12 0 2.6
accuracy Significant
10.004
Control group 60 at 0.01
7.03 2.81 Large
level
Reading Experimental group
37.34 4.61 Significant 6.3
prosody
60 17.532 at 0.01
Control group Large
16.50 5.80 level
Inferentially, there is a statistically significant difference at 0.01 level between the mean scores
of the control and experimental groups on the post-measure in reading rate (T. value = 7.412,
effect size = 1.9), reading accuracy (T. value = 10.004, effect size = 2.6) and reading prosody (T.
value = 17.532, effect size = 6.3) in favour of the experimental group.
Given that both the experimental and control groups were almost at the same level in
reading fluency prior to the intervention, it is concluded that the improvements in the
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experimental group students' reading rate, accuracy and prosody can be attributed to the repeated
reading instruction. These results are in line with those of other studies (e.g. Dowhower, 1987;
Griffith & Rasiniski, 2004; Therrien, 2004; Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2008). The next section
provides the implications of these results.
Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research
The present study provided further evidence for the effectiveness of repeated reading in
developing students' oral reading fluency. The accumulated evidence indicating the effectiveness
of using repeated reading in developing readers' fluency calls for paying due attention to making
use of it as a reliable instructional technique for fostering fluent reading. One way to put this
need into practice is to integrate some repeated reading activities in language teaching textbooks.
When textbooks do not include repeated reading activities, teachers need to use their own
activities to help students struggling with fluency problems.
Teachers and reading material designers may need to consider the key factors that seem
to have helped the experimental group students' improve the three aspects of their fluency. First,
starting the intervention with presenting lists of the most 600 high frequency words helped the
students increase their oral reading rates and make fewer errors while reading. This particularly
concurs with the results of the studies reported by Torgesen and Hudson (2006), and Han and
Chen (2010) who confirm that using high frequency words has an important role in developing
the students' reading accuracy and automaticity. Second, the modeling strategy used helped the
students observe the way of reading each phrase type, thus it contributed to improving their
prosody skills. Presenting models of accurate and inaccurate oral reading and asking the students
to think and identify the correct reading made them more aware of oral reading skills. Third, the
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formative measurement of the students' reading fluency skills made them more motivated to
improve their fluent reading. During the measurement phase in each lesson, the students enjoyed
recording their peers' errors and were keen to make few errors and achieve high number of
correct words as a type of learning competition. Finally, involving the students in repeated,
group-guided oral re-readings of the texts, and paired reading and reading-while-listening
activities enabled them compare their fluency performance to that of the fluent reader model.
In addition to these factors, what enhanced the effectiveness of the intervention is the
explicit instruction of reading fluency. The explicit description and definition of reading fluency,
its key aspects and importance at the beginning of the intervention and at the warm-up stage of
each lesson played a very important role in helping the students clearly understand what they
were going to do. In other words, this improved the students' meta-fluency which was essential
to the improvement of their reading fluency. Raising the students' awareness of meta-fluency
terms (e.g. accuracy, rate, and speed, phrasing, stress, etc.) was important in developing their
ability to think and talk about fluency, and to monitor and self-regulate their fluency
performance. Therefore, explicit instruction of reading fluency is viewed as an essential
component in successful reading fluency teaching.
There are some gaps that need to be addressed in future reading fluency research. While
reading fluency theories generally suggest that enhancing readers' fluency results in improved
reading comprehension due to allocating more attentional resources to it, this hypothesis needs to
be further tested in L2 research. The issue of the relative influence of text type, fluent models'
accents (e.g., native versus non-native), the different times of repeated readings used and the
amount of time allocated to practice in L2 fluency interventions is still unclear. Future research
looking at this issue is warranted. Further research needs also to examine the effectiveness of
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fluency interventions with of secondary school struggling readers. Future studies may also use
correlational and cause-effect research designs to investigate the factors accounting for poor
versus good reading fluency performance. All these suggested studies will provide us with
insightful information about the causes of individual differences in fluent reading and how to
design fluency interventions with optimal characteristics.
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Appendix one
The scoring guide of students' reading fluency
Part 1: guidelines for scoring reading rate and accuracy:1
1. Follow along on the teacher's copy while the student is reading and put a slash (/) through
words read incorrectly.
2. Score reading the three texts while listening to how they are read by each student.
3. If the student does not read any words correctly in the first row of the text, discontinue the
task and record a score of 0 on her scoring sheet.
4. Hesitation or struggle with words: If a student hesitates or struggles with a word for 3
seconds, mark it as incorrect and indicate for the student to continue with the next word.
5. Hyphenated words: hyphenated words are counted as two words if both parts can stand
alone as individual words. Hyphenated words are counted as one word if either part cannot
stand alone as an individual word.
6. Numerals: numerals must be read correctly in the context of the sentence.
1
Adapted from Good, Kaminski & Dills's (2002) DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency scoring guidelines.
127
7. Mispronounced words: a word is scored as correct if it is pronounced correctly given the

context of the sentence. If the word is mispronounced in the context, it is scored as an error.
8. Self-corrections: a word is scored as correct if it is initially mispronounced but the student
self-corrects it within 3 seconds.
9. Repeated words: words that are repeated are not scored as incorrect and are ignored in
scoring.
10. Inserted words: inserted words are ignored and not counted as errors. The student also does
not get additional credit for inserted words.
11. Omitted words: omitted words are scored as incorrect.
12. Word order: all words that are read correctly but in the wrong order are scored as incorrect.
13. Abbreviations: abbreviations should be read the way the person would normally pronounce
the abbreviation in conversation. For example, TV could be read as "teevee" or "television"
but Mr. would be read as "mister".
14. Record the total number of words the student reads per minute, the number of errors she
makes per minute while reading each text, and then the number of correct words she reads
per minute by subtracting the number of errors from the total number of words read in the
same minute on the student's scoring sheet for each text.
Part 2: Reading Prosody:2
Score the student's reading expression through the following rating scale:
1. Phrasing:
Rating Student's reading performance

1 The student reads monotonically with little sense of phrase boundaries, frequent word-
by-word reading.
2 The student reads frequent two-and three- word phrases giving the impression of
choppy reading.
3 The student reads with mixture of run-ons, mid-sentences pauses for breath, and
possibly some choppiness.
4 The student reads generally well phrased, mostly in clause and sentence units, with
adequate attention to expression.
2
Adapted from Zutell & Rasiniski's (1991) Multidimensional Fluency Scale
128
2. Punctuation:
1 The student reads the text without attention to punctuation.
2 The student seldom attends to punctuation while reading.
3 The student usually attends to punctuation in some of the text.
4 The student attends to all punctuation while reading.
3. Vocal Tone:
Rating Student's reading Performance
1 The student reads the text without expressing the character's mental states.
2 The student seldom expresses the character's mental states while reading.
3 The student usually expresses the character's mental states while reading.
4 The student read the text conversationally expressing the character's mental states.
4. Intonation:

1 The student reads all sentences in the same way without intonation.
2 The student seldom uses intonation while reading.
3 The student usually uses intonation while reading.
4 The student uses intonation appropriately while reading.
129
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Improving Readers' Uency in EFL Using Repeated Reading: January 2014

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Improving readers' ﬂuency in EFL using repeated reading

Chapter · January 2014

Muhammad M. M. Abdel Latif

Writing motivation measurement View project

Translator and interpreter education research View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Improving Readers' Fluency in EFL Using Repeated Reading

Dr Marwa Fouad Hegazy Dr Muhammad M. M. Abdel Latif

and presents implications for designing fluency-oriented repeated reading instruction.

a necessary element in student's successful reading development (Rasiniski, 2003). Fluency is

limited attentional resources to be reallocated to higher level reading comprehension processes.

comprehend the text.

Reading fluency is an amorphous construct and it has no agreed-upon definition. Breznitz

reading fluency as an outcome of oral reading quality, the second conceptualizes it as an

effectiveness of some biological and cognitive processes. With these different

conversational rate with appropriate prosody or expression.

the forefront as an important component in reading performance and stimulated researchers'

using different training techniques to develop readers' fluency.

developing L2 readers' fluency.

Repeated reading is a reading fluency development technique that was introduced by

school students- fluency.

and prosody sub-skills)?

a description of the method of the study is given.

Design of the Study

applications" (p. 53).

covering listening, grammar, vocabulary, and communication.

Reading fluency measure and training materials

Reading fluency measure

measure focused on the following three aspects:

whole number of words read per minute.

process of recording the following points in each passage:

 The total number of words the student read per minute.

 The number of errors the student made per minute.

 The number of correct words the student read per minute.

Reading fluency training materials

light of their views and the results of the pilot study.

Data collection procedures

the post-assessment of reading fluency.

After administering the reading fluency pre-assessment to experimental and control

reading comprehension, etc..

In what follows, the results of the data analysis are provided.

value = 17.532, effect size = 6.3) in favour of the experimental group.

provides the implications of these results.

Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research

activities to help students struggling with fluency problems.

performance. Therefore, explicit instruction of reading fluency is viewed as an essential

component in successful reading fluency teaching.

design fluency interventions with optimal characteristics.

Disabilities, 35, 386–406.

Institute for the Development of Educational Achievement.

comprehension: The case of EFL learners in Vietnam. System, 36, 253–278.

Cambridge University Press.

reading curriculum, The Reading Teacher, 58(2), (126-137).

and how? The Reading Teacher, 58(8), 702-714.

Cognitive Psychology, 6, 292-323.

Brigham Young University, USA.

directions. Annals of Dyslexia, 49, 283-306.

Mohr, L. (1982). On rescuing the nonequivalent-control-group design. Sociological Methods &

Research, 1(11), 53-80.

Morisoli, K. K. (2010). Effects of repeated reading on reading fluency of diverse secondary-level

learners. PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, USA.

Perfetti, C. (1985). Reading ability. New York: Oxford University Press.