Students in late-elementary, middle, and high school can have a variety of problems with reading accuracy and fluency. A relatively small number may continue to struggle with simple phonemic decoding strategies, even with words of a single syllable. For the most part, these students will have severe reading disabilities, or will have simply received weak instruction in decoding. Another, larger group has mastered basic decoding skills but lacks strategies for identifying complex, multisyllabic words. Students in this group struggle to identify the new or uncommon words they frequently encounter in content-area texts in middle and high school. Problems at this level arise both because students cannot confidently use a repertoire of word-analysis strategies with these new words and because many of the new words are outside their vocabulary. Finally, another large group of struggling adolescent readers do not read fluently. Although difficulties with reading fluency can be caused by a number of different factors (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003), a principal cause is a lack of accurate reading practice (Torgesen & Hudson, 2006).

A current unknown in adolescent literacy involves appropriate targets for reading fluency for students in middle and high school. When should we be concerned that a student's lack of reading fluency may interfere with his or her ability to comprehend and learn from text? We know that average levels of oral reading fluency stabilize at around 150 correct words per minute for students at the end of sixth, seventh, and eighth grades when reading grade-level text (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2006; Tindal, Hasbrouck, & Jones, 2005; Yovanoff, Duesbery, Alonzo, & Tindal, 2005). Does this mean that we should work to bring all students to this level? The answer to this question will most likely turn out to be "it depends." As Keith Stanovich pointed out some years ago (1984), strong vocabulary, thinking skills, and motivation can often compensate for poor reading accuracy and fluency when the goal is to comprehend text. On the other hand, students who are weaker in content knowledge, vocabulary, and reasoning ability may need to read text more accurately and fluently in order to achieve similar levels of reading comprehension. The point here is that it is not possible at present to specify precise targets for reading fluency and accuracy in adolescent readers when they are reading grade-level text: We know that extremely poor skills in this area can seriously disrupt comprehension, but we do not know precisely how strong students' skills in this area need to be before they are no longer a matter of concern. The answer is likely to vary with the individual student and with the nature of the literacy tasks he or she faces.

There is suggestive evidence that, under the right conditions, intensive and skillful instruction in basic wordreading skills can have a significant impact on the comprehension ability of students in fifth grade and beyond. Presumably, these effects occur when the instruction is sufficiently powerful to substantially increase the percentage of words students can accurately identify in the text they are reading. If reading accuracy is already relatively high, then there may be little benefit in spending more time to improve it further; rather, time may be more profitably spent providing instruction and practice to improve other kinds of knowledge and skill important for reading comprehension.

The Report of the National Reading Panel (National Reading Panel, 2000) supported the use of repeated reading practice to improve reading fluency, but most of the studies summarized in that report examined performance of early elementary school students. In a more recent meta-analysis of studies of repeated reading that included students ranging from age 5 to 18, Therrian (2004) found that a number of specific instructional conditions influenced the size of the effects obtained from this method. One striking finding was that the impact of repeated reading interventions conducted by an adult was more than three times larger than those conducted by peers when the criterion was improvement in either fluency or comprehension on passages the students had not read previously. Another factor that produced higher impacts from repeated reading interventions was corrective feedback about word-reading errors. The study by Homan et al. (1993) described above raises the possibility that similar amounts of nonrepeated reading, when supported by a teacher to provide corrective feedback, can also have a significant impact on fluency and comprehension.

Excerpted from Torgesen, J. K., Houston, D. D., Rissman, L. M., Decker, S. M., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., Wexler, J. Francis, D. J, Rivera, M. O., Lesaux, N. (2007). Academic literacy instruction for adolescents: A guidance document from the Center on Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction. Full report available online at http://www.centeroninstruction.org/files/Academic%20Literacy.pdf.