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Although there is abundant evidence that silent reading existed in antiquity, the question remains as to when it became widespread. Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator asserts that, due to a rise in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries in the number of parents who could afford to let their children read freely, widely, and for prolonged periods, an entire generation grew into fluent, silent readers in the later 1700s. At that point in time, the reader ceased to be a mouthpiece of the writer, becoming instead a silent hearer of an imagined writer’s words. Elspeth Jajdelska uses historical, linguistic, and literary evidence to discuss the reorientation of the text and reader towards one another. She specifically investigates changes in punctuation, sentence structure, and letter and diary writing in the period to illuminate the emergence of a new prose style and the birth of the narrator. Unique to Jajdelska’s study is the consideration of silent reading as something that explains changes in literary history. She also incorporates new insights on the history of reading, the novel, the diary, and the English language, using rigorous linguistic analysis and evidence drawn from the study of psychology. Based on a wealth of compelling arguments, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator is an important addition to literary studies, eighteenth-century history, and book and print culture.

This exploratory study was designed to evaluate the interplay of students’ rate and comprehension in independent silent reading of accessible text, within the frameworks of the Simple View of Reading and the RAND Reading Study Group. In the first phase, 61 sixth graders were given a reading test (GRADE), a motivation questionnaire, and an on-screen measure of comprehension-based silent reading rate (SRF-O, adapted from aimswebPlus SRF) with on-grade and below-grade text. Two-thirds of students had perfect or near-perfect SRF-O comprehension, but the other one-third had moderate to poor comprehension. These weaker SRF-O comprehenders had relatively low GRADE scores, but others with comparable GRADE scores comprehended well on SRF-O. The poorest SRF-O comprehenders read with increasing rate and decreasing comprehension across the SRF-O texts. In the second phase, the 21 students with weaker SRF-O comprehension took an oral reading fluency (ORF) test and a paper form of the silent reading rate measure (SRF-P) in a one-on-one setting. All students comprehended well on SRF-P and their SRF-P rates correlated highly with GRADE and ORF. Results support the view that poor comprehension in independent silent reading of accessible text may be due to factors other than reading ability (such as assessment context) and that, when students read with comprehension, their rate is a good indicator of their reading ability.

Lily Rosene began her teaching career in 2020 when COVID-19 derailed her career plans and anearby school was desperate for teachers. She entered her first 9th-grade English classroom without a clear understanding of her students or the curriculum. However, she knew reading was important to any English classroom, so she decided to make silent reading part of her routine. And personal experience showed her that personal choice could promote a love of reading, so she decided to let her students pick their own books. This aligned with some of the ideas a mentor teacher shared with her, but it wasn’t a common practice at her school. However, after two years of building a classroom around independent reading and student choice, she saw positive results in her students’ standardized test scores.

This quasi-experimental study aims to investigate the effects of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), Assisted Repeated Reading (ARR), and Traditional Reading (TR) instructions integrated into an EFL reading program on EFL reading comprehension, silent reading rate, reading motivation, and attitudes toward EFL reading, by also addressing the potential effect of proficiency level. Adopting a mixed-method pretest-posttest research design, this 10-week study was conducted with mixed-proficiency university-level Turkish EFL learners divided into three experimental groups. A method incorporating 150-minute SSR or ARR instructions into the 150-minute intensive reading instruction in two groups was implemented, as compared against a TR group that received 300-minute traditional intensive reading instruction weekly. Data came from a reading comprehension and rate test, reading motivation questionnaire, participant reflections, and interviews. Findings indicated that SSR yielded significant benefits for reading comprehension of both low and high-proficiency participants. Moreover, SSR and ARR showed positive effects on intrinsic reading motivation, whereas TR contributed slightly to extrinsic reading motivation. Regarding the possible effect of proficiency, while SSR yielded more advantages for higher-proficiency learners, ARR and TR were comparatively more beneficial for lower-proficiency learners. Implications for pedagogy and future research for university-level EFL reading classes are discussed.

Although strong claims have been made regarding the educational utility of eye tracking, such statements seem somewhat unfounded in the absence of clear evidence regarding the technical adequacy of eye movement (EM) data. Past studies have yielded direct and indirect evidence concerning the utility of EMs as measures of reading, but recent research explicitly investigating their reliability and validity has been lacking. The current study updates and extends past research by investigating the reliability and validity of recently used EM measures of children's reading. Participants were 175 second-grade students whose Ems were monitored during silent reading of narrative text(s) at two timepoints. Participants were also individually administered measures of reading achievement. Results indicate adequate reliability and validity for passage-level measures of fixation duration but suggest that elementary students' reading behaviors relative to specific words are weakly associated with their normative levels of reading achievement.

Reading difficulties in school are very challenging for teachers due to many different reader subtypes in one and the same class. Moreover, there are few easy-to-use tools enabling teachers to assess reading ability. According to the Simple View of Reading (Hoover and Gough in Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127–160, 1990), efficient reading comprehension is the result of an interaction between word reading (through three word representation levels: orthographic, phonological, and semantic) and comprehension (through three processing types: literal, text-connecting, and gap-filling inferences). Difficulties in one of these components, or in both, should lead to difficulties in reading comprehension and bring about different reader subtypes. This study aims, first, to examine the validity of the tool and, second, to explore performance reading patterns of children with reading difficulties. A population of 485 typically developing French children from grade 2 to grade 9 was tested using three computerized tasks that recorded accuracy and speed: lexical quality to examine the three levels of word representation; silent reading and listening comprehension to examine both literal and inferential processing. Results showed the appropriateness of the tool but also identified a number of limits. It was possible with the results to detect 76 children with reading comprehension difficulties and to divide them into 5 clusters essentially according to their word reading performances. The results are discussed in relation to the theoretical frameworks used to build the tool.

Fluent reading in a foreign language includes a complex coordination process of visual and auditory nature as the reading brain transforms written symbols into speaking auditory patterns through subvocalization (inner voice). The auditory information activated for reading involves the projection of speech prosody and allows, beyond letters and words decoding, the recognition of word boundaries and the construction of the melodic contours of the phrase. On the one hand, phonological awareness and auditory working memory have been identified in the literature as relevant factors in the reading process as skilled readers keep the acoustic information in their auditory working memory to predict the construction of larger lexical units. On the other hand, we observed that the inclusion of musical aptitude as an element belonging to the acoustic dimension of the silent reading aptitude of adults learning a foreign language remains understudied. Therefore, this study examines the silent reading fluency of 117 Italian adult students of Spanish as a foreign language. Our main aim was to find a model that could show if linguistic, cognitive and musical skills influence adults' silent reading fluency. We hypothesized that learners' contextual word recognition ability in L1 and FL in addition to, phonological awareness, auditory working memory and musical aptitude, elements related to the acoustic dimension of reading, would influence adults' silent reading fluency. Our structural modeling allows us to describe how these different variables interact to determine the silent reading fluency construct. In fact, the effect of musical aptitude on fluent silent reading in our model reveals to be stronger than phonological awareness or auditory working memory.

A reading acceleration program known to improve reading fluency in Hebrew-speaking adults was tested for its effect on children. Eighty-nine Hebrew- and English-speaking children with reading difficulties were divided into a waiting list group and two training groups (Hebrew and English) and underwent 4 weeks of reading acceleration training. Results of pre- and post-testing of reading abilities point to a significant main effect of the test, demonstrating improvements in silent contextual reading speed, reading comprehension, and speed of processing in both Hebrew and English training groups as compared to their performance before the intervention. This study indicates that the Reading Acceleration Program might be an effective program for improving reading abilities in children, independent of language.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between students' reading fluency and comprehension. It is a correlational design. A purposive sampling technique was employed to select the district, school, students, and grade level. Accordingly, 100 students participated in the study. As the research was quantitative, reading comprehension tests and comprehension-based silent reading fluency tests were applied to collect data. The data was analyzed using statistical techniques like Pearson product-moment correlation and linear regression. The findings revealed that reading accuracy level and reading rate, which are the parameters of reading fluency, were strongly correlated (r =. 885, P < 0.01) with each other. However, silent reading fluency (SRF) had a moderate correlation with reading comprehension. Moreover, the reading rate had a strong positive correlation with reading accuracy (r =.885, p < 0.01, and reading comprehension (r =.410, p<0.01). In addition, the linear regression outputs confirmed that the higher the students' reading rate and accuracy level, the higher their reading comprehension (Beta = 0.42, t = 4.53, p < 0.05).  It means that when reading rate and accuracy increase, so do their reading comprehension.  The results suggest that reading rate and accuracy levels are valid measures of reading ability when students read silently with comprehension

We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffuse tensor imaging (DTI) to study neural implications of silent reading of words in mutually comprehensible but visually and orthographically distinct languages for example Hindi and Urdu by independent groups of skilled readers. The fMRI results (conjunction analyses) showed the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45), bilateral inferior occipital (BA 18/19), bilateral superior parietal (BA 7), left pre-central region (BA 6), and bilateral inferior temporal gyrus (BA 20) as common regions for Hindi and Urdu readers. Some additional regions such as left ventral occipitotemporal, left middle frontal (BA 46), left middle occipital (BA18), and bilateral post-central regions (BA 3) were observed for Urdu readers. DTI results showed significantly higher FA value at the left inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus in Urdu speakers. Overall findings suggest strong engagement of ventral visual pathway in reading Urdu which has a visually complex deep orthography.