Reading fluency: Neglected or corrupted

摘要: In 1983, Richard Allington described fluency as the “neglected reading goal." Less than 20 years later, reading fluency was enshrined as one of the “five pillars” of reading instruction (National Reading Panel, 2000). The dramatic increase in the status of reading fluency has been nothing short of a phenomenon. But is the reading fluency described by Allington in 1983 the same as the fluency encased in the five pillars? Or, has reading fluency been corrupted to mean something quite different? We believe it is the latter. We argue in this paper that there are really two competing conceptions of reading fluency in the literature and that one is coming to dominate over the other. One conception of fluency (ie, the emerging dominant view) is focused solely on automaticity, and the other conception (ie, the diminishing view) includes attention to prosody as a significant aspect of fluent reading. We are troubled that these …