What is accurate and fluent reading of connected text?
Accuracy and fluency with connected text, both critical components of skilled reading, allow meaning to be gained from text. To read a text easily and make sense of it, a large percentage of the words must be decoded effortlessly (Ehri, 1998). Reading fluency depends on well-developed word attack skills (National Reading Panel, 2000), efficient and automatic decoding of regular and irregular words, and the use of expression and phrasing while reading aloud (Dowhower, 1991; Schreiber, 1987, 1991). Oral reading fluency in connected text is more than the accurate reading of words in lists and is not speed-reading. Oral reading fluency can be described as the bridge between accurate, automatic, word-level decoding and reading comprehension.