Échelle Multi-Dimensionnelle de Fluence: A new tool to assess reading fluency including prosody in French, calibrated for grades 2 to 7

Children’s reading fluency is usually assessed in classrooms using the instruction: “Read as fast as you can.” This instruction tends to perpetuate the confusion between fluency and speed. However, reading fast is not enough to be a good reader. Beyond speed, accuracy, and automaticity, prosody, i.e. expressivity and phrasing, are necessary skills for reading fluently and understanding the content. We present here an assessment tool for reading fluency that includes prosodic features, namely expressivity and phrasing. This tool is an adaptation of the MultiDimensionnal Fluency Scale (Rasinsky 2004) for French. Three raters assessed the reading of two narrative texts by 295 children from grades 2 to 7. Their scores are presented as a standardization of this scale. Various analyses of the scores, inter-rater agreement, correlation with the classic standardized reading rate test, and acoustic parameters indicate a high level of fidelity, sensitivity, and validity of this reading assessment tool.