**1. History**

From the colonial period in America until the early 1900s, one major focus of beginning literacy instruction was expressive oral reading. During the 1600s through the end of the 1700s, "the aim of developing eloquent oral reading was paramount..." [1]. Children were expected to read texts—especially the Bible—expressively. The limited number of suggestions and instructions provided to teachers during this period encouraged use of "exercises for pronunciation and enunciation" [1,2]. Although the types of selections and methods of instruction varied through the mid-1800s, expressive oral reading continued to be stressed in U.S. schools.

A major transition from stressing oral reading to attending to silent reading occurred in the early 1900s, initially led by Francis W. Parker [1]. He distinguished between expression (speech and oral reading) and attention (silent reading). Parker and others argued that silent reading should be preferred over oral reading, because most of the reading that adults do in their lives is silent, and this form of reading leads to greater rate and increased comprehension. This movement toward privileging silent over oral reading was supported by William S. Gray, major author of the popular Dick and Jane books and the preeminent reading figure of his day. This change in focus shifted from performing text to comprehending it [2].

For decades, the attention paid to silent reading and comprehension diverted attention from fluency, including expressive oral reading. The prevailing view then was that once readers had identified the words in text, they would understand what they had read through use of oral language comprehension processes [3]. Reading educators and researchers discussed most e ffective approaches to reading instruction, focusing on whole word vs. phonics instruction. The ensuing reading wars continued for decades, and fluency instruction was largely overlooked in classroom practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s various models of the reading process were developed, including one in which automaticity of word identification was a key element [4]. As theoreticians began to attend to the necessity of readers to automatically identify words quickly and accurately, some called for teachers to encourage the practice of oral reading fluency with their students. The method of repeated reading [5] and Neurological Impress [6] were developed to help readers increase word identification abilities of students so that they could use more cognitive resources to attend to meaning.

It was in this context that Allington published his article, "Fluency: The Neglected Goal" [7], in which he highlighted the need to return attention to fluency in elementary school instruction. He encouraged attention to developing readers' rates and accuracy of oral reading, but also reminded teachers to focus on expressive reading. Allington was not alone in reminding teachers of the need to focus on developing fluent readers. Collins compared the prosody of good and poor readers at a time when most of the focus on fluency instruction was rate and accuracy. Collins reported that teachers often focused struggling readers' attention on saying the words correctly, while proficient readers were encouraged to make the text sound right when they read orally [8].

Even though this research attended to expressive oral reading, the inclusion of prosody in a definition of fluency was not cemented in many people's minds until the Report of the National Reading Panel in 2000 [9]. With the publication of that pivotal report, most in the literacy research and teaching communities included three aspects of fluent oral reading—rate, accuracy, and expression. However, the ease of assessing rate and accuracy resulted in an emphasis on those two factors over prosody.
