Beth Ann O’Brien
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Beth A. O’Brien is Principal Research Scientist at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Child Development. Her research focus is reading development from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, and how at-risk, dyslexic, bilingual learners interact with different educational experiences.
Reading Fluency: Contributing factors, age and language effects
While comprehension is the ultimate purpose of reading, children must first develop a set of component skills over the course of learning to read, and they must learn to integrate these skills to support reading for meaning. One component skill that is strongly related to comprehension, and which is included in the pillars of reading acquisition, is reading fluency. Reading fluency presents a challenge for struggling learners, and is more resilient to remediation compared to decoding skills, perhaps due to an emphasis on addressing phonological component skills. The basis for our understanding of reading fluency, its development and remediation, comes primarily from research on English reading. A view of reading and reading disorders that may be more suited to languages besides English aligns with a multifactorial model of dyslexia beyond a phonological core deficit (e.g., Pennington 2006; Parilla 2008). Thus, this talk will focus on issues related to reading fluency development across age groups and scripts. Based on previous and current work, I will address issues of measuring reading fluency, particularly for silent reading (Wallot, Van Orden & O’Brien, 2012), the relationship between reading skills, fluency and comprehension (O’Brien & Wallot, 2016; O’Brien, Wolf, Miller, Lovett, & Morris, 2011), and finally considerations for variation across writing systems (Bhattacharjee et al., 2020; Wu & O’Brien, 2024). Importantly, a better understanding of these issues will contribute to improved educational instruction, and diagnosis and treatment of learning disorders.
