Book Chapter

Assessing Word Identification and Reading Fluency

Kilpatrick, David A

2015

Overview

Word‐level reading skills are foundational to reading comprehension. The correlation between isolated word‐level reading and reading comprehension is quite high. Reading fluency is also highly predictive of reading comprehension. This chapter focuses on the assessment of both isolated word reading and reading fluency. The obvious way to provide a correct response to an unfamiliar word on a word identification task is through phonic decoding. Most word identification tests consist of a graded word list, so any guessing is not based on context. Little needs to be said about the traditional word identification subtests because they are familiar to those doing educational evaluations. These tasks/subtests are standard on almost every achievement battery that assesses reading. One can define at least four functional types of fluency tasks: RAN (digits, letters, objects or colors); word‐level fluency (real words and nonsense words); sentence‐level fluency; and passage‐level fluency.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc
• Subject: isolated word reading / phonic decoding / reading fluency / word identification subtests / word identification tests / word‐level reading
• ISBN: 1118845242, 9781118845240