Repeated Reading Interventions for Students with Learning Disabilities: Status of the Evidence (Report‪)‬

Learning to read remains a hallmark skill that essentially defines the degree of success students can achieve academically throughout their school career. For students who learn to read early and well, the occasion is set for them to flourish in vocabulary and language development, comprehension, and content area learning (Stanovich, 1986). Students with or at risk for learning disabilities (LD) are most often identified for special education services due to their measurable difficulties with early reading acquisition, specifically difficulties with word identification. Basic deficits in alphabetic coding are the underlying cause of these difficulties, with deficits most often attributed to deficiencies in reading-related cognitive abilities, namely phonological skill deficiencies (Stanovich; Torgesen et al., 2001). Below-average readers frequently experience difficulties with metaphonological and metalinguistic tasks, supporting the notion that they experience a phonological core deficit (e.g., Snowling, 2000; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Vellutino et al., 1996). Students who experience a phonological core deficit are characterized by poor phonological awareness and verbal short-term memory as well as below-average speed of access to phonological information in long-term memory (Adams, 1990; Lipka, Lesaux, & Siegel, 2006). Decoding difficulties limit students' opportunities to read texts, decrease students' exposure to words, limit vocabulary learning, and hamper the development of content-area expertise through reading comprehension. Because of the effect this core deficit can have on long-term reading achievement, early reading interventions generally focus on improving students' phonological awareness, decoding skills, sight word identification, and fluency development. Evidence suggests that this focus can be particularly fruitful for many students (Mathes, Howard, Allen, & Fuchs, 1998; McMaster, Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2005; Simmons et al., 2008; Vellutino, Scanlon, & Tanzman, 1998). Intervention efforts for students with LD in reading tend to focus early on the development of decoding skills followed by fluency building in connected texts. More specifically and important for the present review, fluency-building interventions have often featured repeated reading activities aimed at improving the speed and accuracy of students' text reading (Chard, Vaughn, & Tyler, 2002; Therrien, 2004). Repeated reading offers students an opportunity to read and reread the same text multiple times and is implemented in a variety of formats including partner reading, reading to an older peer or family member, or reading with an audiotape.