The Importance of Prosody in Reading Assessment

In a recent Voice of Literacy podcast, Dr. Paula Schwanenflugel discussed the importance of assessing young readers' comprehension with a focus on prosody in addition to accuracy and rate. While the most common forms of assessing reading fluency are measuring the speed at which a child reads and the number of correctly spoken words, these alone may not give us a complete picture of how well the child is comprehending what she is reading. Giving attention to prosody, or the ability to read aloud with natural sounding inflection, intonation, and pacing, and the appropriate use of pauses, may provide a much better measure of comprehension. In other words, if a child can approximate the sounds of natural speech while she  is reading aloud, she probably understands what she is reading.

Dr. Schwanenflugel describes the rubric that she uses in this type of assessment known as the Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale. This rubric addresses accuracy, rate, and prosody. An interesting element in this form of assessment is the use of spectrographs, or visual representations based on measurements of speech sounds including pitch, pausing, and amplitude. These spectrographs provide a good picture of the child's ability to read aloud naturally and expressively, which Dr. Schwanenflugel says is a strong predictor for comprehension.

Dr. Schwanenflugel makes the important point in  Becoming a Fluent Reader: Reading Skill and Prosodic Features in the Oral Reading of Young Readers,that "prosodic features in spoken language itself may be under development to some extent at the age when most children are learning to read prosodically." In fact, it may not be until the age of 9 or 10 that children fully develop the ability to understand some of the subtler variances in speech. This is certainly worth keeping in mind when pursuing these types of assessments.

In some ways, this approach to assessment seems to almost be common sense to me. In my own experiences working with children, I have found that those who can read aloud in a natural sounding voice are those most likely to understand what they have read. Those children who read aloud in a stilted, monotonous voice may be able to read quickly and even accurately, but they often are not able to demonstrate any understanding of what they had just read. In my opinion, there is a strong argument for including a measurement of prosody in the assessment of children's reading fluency.