**5. Conclusions**

This study set out to explore the e ffects of fluency oriented reading instruction on motivation among struggling readers in First Class in Irish primary schools. The findings sugges<sup>t</sup> that reading di fficulties for these emergen<sup>t</sup> readers are far from insurmountable. However, the current practice of learning support teachers in teaching struggling readers is disproportionally focused on a bottom–up approach to reading instruction rather than on a ffective processes. In order for struggling readers to overcome skill deficiencies in reading and to be motivated to continue to read, it is imperative that any negative achievement-related self-beliefs are simultaneously addressed.

To achieve this, there needs to be a shift from a purely cognitive interpretation of reading instruction to a motivational and emotional co-determination of beginning reading skills. A conception of compensatory education for students with reading di fficulties would thus embrace the engagemen<sup>t</sup> perspective while integrating cognitive, motivational, and social aspects of reading. The fluency oriented reading instruction employed in this study aligns with this conception and has been found to positively influence the motivation for reading of young struggling readers in this study.

#### **Funding:** This research received no external funding

**Acknowledgments:** The author is indebted to the teachers and parents who generously gave their time to participate in this research. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge the role played by the students who participated in this study. They embraced each activity with gusto and kept the intervention afloat on a tide of enthusiasm.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest

#### **References and Notes**


© 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

*Review*

## **Assessing Expressive Oral Reading Fluency**

#### **Timothy G. Morrison \* and Brad Wilcox**

Department of Teacher Education, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA; brad\_wilcox@byu.edu **\*** Correspondence: tim\_morrison@byu.edu

Received: 4 February 2020; Accepted: 29 February 2020; Published: 4 March 2020

**Abstract:** Educators struggle to assess various aspects of reading in valid and reliable ways. Whether it is comprehension, phonological awareness, vocabulary, or phonics, determining appropriate assessments is challenging across grade levels and student abilities. Also challenging is measuring aspects of fluency: rate, accuracy, and prosody. This article presents a history of fluency in American education with particular focus on assessing expressive oral reading. In addition, the two major approaches to prosody assessment will be explained, and the three most prominent tools for rating expressive oral reading will be analyzed and discussed.

**Keywords:** fluency; prosody; NAEP; MDFS; spectrographic measurement
