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Many students have difficulty achieving reading fluency, and nearly half of fourth graders are not fluent readers in grade-level texts. Intensive and focused reading practice is recommended to help close the gap between students with poor fluency and their average reading peers. In this study, the Quick Reads fluency program was used as a supplemental fluency intervention for fourth and fifth graders with below-grade-level reading skills. Quick Reads prescribes a repeated reading procedure with short nonfiction texts written on grade-appropriate science and social science topics. Text characteristics are designed to promote word recognition skills. Students were randomly assigned to Quick Reads instruction that was implemented by trained paraeducator tutors with pairs of students for 30 minutes per day, 4 days per week, for 18 weeks. At posttest, Quick Reads students significantly outperformed classroom controls in vocabulary, word comprehension, and passage comprehension. Fluency rates for both treatment and control groups remained below grade level at posttest.
Keywords: fluency; repeated reading; paraeducator tutors
Skilled reading appears deceptively effortless but is coming to be better appreciated as the balanced coordination and timing of subskills involved in word recognition and comprehension (Perfetti, 1992; Stanovich, 1980). The effortless and fluent reading of text, or reading fluency, is often summarized as "the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly, and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading such as decoding" (Meyer & Felton, 1999, p. 284). This definition guides the most common procedure for describing fluency in terms of rate and accuracy on an oral reading measure, such as a curriculum-based assessment. More comprehensive fluency assessment may include standardized procedures that capture prosody and comprehension (Pikulski & Chard, 2005). This definition also guides the most widely used instructional approaches to improve reading fluency, including repeated reading (Dahl, 1979; Samuels, 1979).
Our understanding of reading fluency continues to be deepened by research that underscores the developmental nature of fluency (Bowers, 1995; Kame'enui, Simmons, Good, & Harn, 2001; Manis & Freedman, 2001; Pikulski, 2006), the underlying lexical and sublexical processes that support fluency (Ehri, 1995; Wolf & Bowers, 1999), and the coordination of both cognitive and attentional resources (Berninger, Abbott, Billingsley, & Nagy, 2001; Breznitz, 2001) that supports this illusion of effortless fluent reading. As it is most...