On the Acquisition of Reading Fluency

Abstract

The acquisition of reading fluency crucially involves the beginning reader's tacit recognition that s/he must learn to compensate for the absence of graphic signals corresponding to certain prosodie cues by making better use of the morphological and syntactic cues that are preserved. It is argued that the success of the method of repeated readings and similar reading instruction techniques results from the fact that these methods facilitate discovery of the appropriate syntactic phrasing in the written signal. It is suggested that the crucial step comes with the beginning reader's recognition that parsing strategies other than those which rely on prosody or its somewhat haphazard graphic analogues are required in order to read with sense.