Chapter 9. Development of Reading Prosody and its Assessment

One of the most noticeable transformations in children’s oral reading that occurs as they become skilled readers is the development of good reading prosody. We discuss research carried out in our laboratories that describes the nature of these changes in reading prosody. We describe the consistent patterns observed across studies in spectrographically measured prosody features. We discuss where reading prosody fits theoretically in the general development of reading skills. We discuss how researchers have translated their understanding of reading prosody into the development of reading fluency rating scales, and evaluate the validity of the scales. Finally, we discuss open questions in our understanding of reading prosody, particularly with regard to the place of prosody in classroom assessment of reading skill.