Few studies have examined the effects of extensive reading (ER) on foreign language learners' acquisition of sight vocabulary, especially for partially known high-frequency words and reading fluency development. This study compared groups of non-English-major Japanese university-level students engaged in ER with intensive reading (IR) for two…

Twenty adult ESL students at a community college participated in a semester reading intervention. Participants received a modified extensive reading treatment, and some participants received an additional repeated reading direct instruction reading intervention. The author examined the impact of the reading interventions on ESL students' reading…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the reading fluency and the reading comprehension in accordance with the type of the text. Participants of the study are 99 students who were chosen among fifth graders in a Turkish secondary school. The study utilized descriptive analysis and adopted predictive correlational…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

Two groups of English as a second language students engaged in a fourteen-week repeated reading (RR) treatment: (1) a 3x group (n = 16), which engaged in three readings per session, and (2) a 5x group (n = 15), which engaged in five readings per session. Reading rate and background knowledge were measured at five points to assess the effect of…

The progression of silent reading rates and reading comprehension were examined among Japanese university students (N = 55) over one academic semester. Participants were divided into three quasi-experimental groups. The first group practiced a combination of timed reading and repeated oral reading with attention paid to chunking and prosody. The…

This study investigated the effects of (a) the amount of pleasure reading completed, (b) the type of texts read (i.e., simplified or unsimplified books), and (c) the level of simplified texts read by 14 Japanese university students who made the largest reading rate gains over one academic year. The findings indicated that the participants who made…

Oral reading fluency, which includes the effortless and smooth oral production of text, is an essential part of deriving meaning from text. Fluency is a particularly important skill in upper elementary school grades when students are exposed to higher level reading materials. The authors evaluated the effects of a repeated readings intervention…

Schools across the nation are responding to reading assessment mandates by turning to DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), a program endorsed by the Federal Reading First Grant Office, to assess fluency on a range of reading-related tasks. DIBELS makes strong claims regarding its usefulness in documenting reading progress…

Reading fluency has been identified as a key component in reading and in learning to read. Moreover, a significantly large number of students who experience difficulty in reading manifest difficulties in reading fluency that appear to contribute to their overall struggles in reading. In this article we explore the nature of effective instruction…

Due to the great interest of practitioners on reading fluency in first language (L1) and second language (L2) English classroom settings, fluency has become a hot topic. A number of studies have suggested that an extensive reading (ER) program can lead to improvement of L2 learners' reading rate; however, studies about high school students are…

Introduces middle and secondary school teachers to wordless picture books and discusses how such books can be used to alleviate students' lack of reading fluency. Provides a list of wordless picture books that appeal to older students. (FL)