Text complexity and oral reading prosody in young readers

Benjamin, Rebecca George, & Schwanenflugel, Paula J. (2010). Text complexity and oral reading prosody in young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(4), 388-404.


Prosody as a component of reading, and more specifically as a component of reading fluency, has been under-investigated in the body of research on fluency that followed the National Reading Panel Report. Prosody is a more specific term related to what is known as reading “expression”, and includes loudness, duration, pitch, and pausing during oral reading. Although the National Reading Panel did include expression, along with speed and accuracy, as a part of reading fluency, as it often happens, that which was easily measured and quantified (speed and accuracy) took precedence. If the study summarized in this article is solid, however, it may be that expression is just as important as speed and accuracy, and may even be more important when a child is reading texts that are somewhat difficult for him.

Although this study of 90 second graders’ reading prosody is part of an interesting and groundbreaking line of research, unfortunately, this particular article will not engage many classroom teachers, and I must admit it was challenging for me, as well as pretty dry, at least on my initial reading, and particularly the Results section. These days, there are many statistical options available to test hypotheses with, and it often seems that every procedure possible just has to be used to manipulate the data, or at least it seemed so to me for a while as I was reading this. Only the most interested and motivated reader sticks with these kinds of articles. It may be that the more practitioner-oriented articles will come later, as this research stream grows and generates more concrete and specific classroom applications. For those who stick with this report, though, there are some interesting nuggets. First, I was impressed with the way data were collected using spectrographic analysis. At last--for an abstract, previously mysterious component like prosody, we actually can observe and chart the process using physical properties of sound, and we can capture, represent, and store the evidence digitally (I felt the same thrill as I did when I first heard about the devices that were used in eye movement research.). The potentialities of such a tool are breathtaking. Once something is captured digitally, it can be enhanced, manipulated, analyzed, and communicated in a myriad number of ways. That alone kept me reading through the dry places in the article. Second, I am thrilled to see someone looking beyond speed and accuracy to the beautiful, artistic components of reading, even though those components were represented quantitatively. For too long we have defined and measured fluency as speed and accuracy, teaching children that fast reading is good reading. It is time we looked beyond that notion. Finally, and most significantly for me, there was the finding that for all children, regardless of ability (as measured by pretests), prosody actually increased when texts became more difficult. You’d think it would be just the opposite, and the authors themselves express some wonder at this finding. They propose that maybe prosody serves as a sort of comprehension scaffold, and that doing things like pausing and attending to syntactic features in a sentence could actually help readers hold text in memory better, and people tend to do those kinds of things more when reading complex, difficult text. Wow! Once again, I am stunned by the beautiful complexity of the reading process and the resourcefulness of the human mind. If this is not a call for strengths-based teaching, using challenging, meaningful text, I don’t know what is.