The Contribution of Fluency on Reading
Reading fluency and accuracy are the core principles of literacy. Reading or oral reading fluency is defined by the speed or rate at which the student can read connected texts accurately. Fluent readers use minimal effort to decode words accurately and fluently. It is reported that expert readers use limited cognitive resources for decoding words so that these resources can be reserved for comprehension. Fluency and accuracy tests are popularly used to measure reading ability in individuals. This assessment also measures the automaticity while reading texts. According to the automaticity theory of reading, expert readers move from conscious and accurate reading to automatic and accurate reading (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Samuels, 2002; Stanovich, 1991). In reading research, text reading fluency has received substantial attention as it is one of the predictors of reading efficiency. Text reading is different from word reading as text reading comprises paragraph reading, where all the elements of a language are combined meaningfully. Researchers have emphasized text reading tasks as both fluency and comprehension can be measured with the help of this task as opposed to reading only isolated words. Another test to measure reading efficiency is the reading accuracy test, where participants are asked to read words and connected texts to identify how many words they have mispronounced or have made an error in reading those words aloud. Hence, reading accuracy refers to the ability to decode words correctly. Researchers and educators have recently emphasized the importance of students’ performance tests that diagnose academic achievement in school-going children, especially in reading and writing. The tests help teachers to make informed decisions about the instructional needs of the students.
In reading research literature, oral fluency assessments have garnered considerable attention. The fact that verbal reading fluency is a robust method to evaluate reading competencies in primary school children has been discussed by Fuchs, Hosp, and Jenkins (2001) and Good, Simmons, and Kame’enui (2001). Fluency and accuracy measures can be reliable for assessing young learners' reading development. La Berge and Samuels (1974) work has been instrumental in theorizing the validity of fluency and accuracy measures. They argued that when decoding is effortless, the reader’s attention can be directed to higher cognitive processes such as comprehension. Good et al. (2001), through their model of fluent reading, have reported that the domain of reading fluency also includes the awareness of phonemes and their alphabetic principles. Their model is based on how fluency in phonemic awareness subsequently leads to text reading fluency by applying the mapping principles of graphemes to phonemes. From these observations, it can be stated that proficient reading is multidimensional, as it employs the process of accurate decoding, automaticity, and meaningful interpretation. Similar interpretations have been given by Kuhn and Stahl (2003), Álvarez-Cañizo et al. (2015), and Elhassan et al. (2015); they state that three main components define fluent reading: rapidity, correctness, and prosody. While three linguistic features are necessary, the first two are most helpful in predicting reading development in educational and clinical contexts. Accuracy and speed are the only standardized measures for assessing reading performance in school-going children. Mastering fluency in reading is considered a complex task as the learner has to combine perceptual skills to correspond symbols to sound, then use lexical skills to integrate those sounds into whole words and process the meaning of words within sentences (Fuschs et al., 2001). A young learner has to acquire these skills effortlessly for successful reading outcomes.