**2. Prosody**

Prosody refers to elements of speech that go beyond ability to produce vowel and consonant sounds to the ability to use appropriate intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm when reading connected text. When young children are first learning, they read orally, not silently. Caregivers and others read orally to preschoolers, and their first attempts at reading are oral. As beginners, many children read with very little expression when they try to verbalize the words they see in text. As their word identification becomes more automatic, they increase their rate of reading, allowing them to allocate cognitive resources to comprehension and oral reading expression [10].

Many teachers and others prompt children to make their oral reading sound like they are talking, not reading with a monotone voice. "When a child reads prosodically, oral reading sounds much like speech with appropriate phrasing, pause structures, stress, rise and fall patterns, and general expressiveness" [11].

Prosody seems to be closely associated with reading comprehension. Even though researchers discuss fluency di fferently, most agree that the link between fluency and students' understanding of the text they encounter is substantial. Those who read with good expression also tend to have better reading comprehension abilities than can be explained by reading rates alone [12]. They recognize the phrasal and syntactical structures the author is using and are able to deliver the text orally as the author intended. However, this alone does not guarantee comprehension. It appears that oral reading fluency can sometimes limit or support comprehension [13]. When children read very slowly and with poor accuracy, their comprehension can su ffer, even if they read expressively. As children read faster and with greater accuracy, their reading comprehension can also increase, even if their prosody does not improve. Thus, as children increase their rate, accuracy, and expression, a question arises: Does improved prosody lead to greater reading comprehension, or does comprehension of text lead to the ability to read with greater expression?

Although the research is not conclusive, it seems to indicate that there are di fferential implications for both proficient and struggling readers. "Some researchers have suggested that becoming a fluent reader has more to do with focusing on meaning construction than it has to do with attending to the words on a page" [14]. As proficient readers attend to meaning during reading, their oral reading expression demonstrates their understanding. But expressive oral reading influences struggling readers in a di fferent way. Strugglers are typically more focused on word identification. As they work to identify words, the flow of the text is interrupted and their lack of expressive reading demonstrates their poor understanding [15]. The best way to characterize the research on prosody and reading comprehension may be summed up by Schwanenflugel and Kuhn: "It has been argued that the relationship between fluency and comprehension is bidirectional: both reciprocal and interactive" [15].

#### **3. Approaches to Prosody Assessment**

Teachers provide instruction and model oral reading to help children develop their own reading fluency abilities. In addition, they need to assess children's fluency development, including expressive oral reading. Assessing oral reading rate and accuracy is relatively straightforward. Teachers and researchers can easily measure students' reading rates by establishing the number of words students read per minute (wpm). They can also measure the number of words students read correctly as they read (wcpm). The 2002 NAEP assessment of fluency for fourth graders showed that students read at an average rate of 119 words per minute, and that 90% of students read at least 95% of words accurately, when scoring only meaning-change miscues as errors. As rate of reading increased, comprehension scores also increased. Measuring e ffective prosodic reading, however, is more challenging.

Two general approaches to assessing expressive oral reading have been developed. One approach does not depend on rater judgments of students' reading, opting instead for a more objective method. Recordings of oral reading are analyzed by automated means to measure elements of speech, such as pitch, intensity, and duration [16,17]. In a second approach, human raters make subjective judgments about individuals' prosodic reading utilizing rubrics that describe various aspects of expressive oral reading [14,18].
