Transfer from Word Training to Reading in Context: Gains in Reading Fluency and Comprehension

This article reports two studies that examined the relationship between word identification speed and story reading fluency, as indicated by speed and accuracy as well as comprehension. Poor readers in grade 4 were trained to read a set of single words and were then asked to repeatedly read stories that contained the trained words or stories with words not included in the training set. Benefits to text reading from single-word practice were observed, even for children who were particularly slow namers. The results are related to theoretical links between fluency and comprehension and to theories of developmental deficits.