Reading fluency is typically defined as accurate and fast reading with appropriate expression. It is often measured as the rate of correctly reading words, either in lists or in connected texts. Fluent reading is considered necessary for understanding nontrivial passages and is associated with better reading comprehension.
These superficial descriptions are highly useful in applied situations; however, they belie our broad and deep ignorance regarding the nature and importance of reading fluency: We do not really understand either the cognitive mechanisms of fluent reading or the potential causal connections between fluency and comprehension.
In the BetterReading project we tackle some of these issues head on. We administer a repeated reading intervention, which is known to improve fluency, and we study what is affected by the intervention, in unprecedented detail. This will help us identify cognitive processes that are both critical for fluency and responsive to intervention.
We build on recent theoretical developments on the nature of reading fluency, going beyond the established but insufficient notion of word reading automaticity. In particular, we aim to understand the importance of scheduling sequences, a skill domain typically indexed by rapid serial naming (or RAN) tasks; and we study the role of interference by adjacent words, which can impede the development of fluency in less skilled readers.
Finally, we apply time-limited measures of comprehension to assess a novel construct of reading comprehension efficiency, defined as the rate at which readers extract information from text, aiming to directly address the elusive link between fluency and comprehension.