The primary purpose of recording a student's oral reading and playing it back is to measure which aspect?

• A. Comprehension
• B. Vocabulary
• C. Decoding Accuracy
• D. Reading Fluency

Answer: (D)

Recording and playing back a student’s oral reading targets reading fluency—the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and expression. When you listen to a recording, you can judge how fast the student reads (rate), how often they mispronounce or skip words (accuracy), and how they use phrasing, pauses, and intonation (prosody). These elements together show how smoothly the reader can connect decoding with expression, which supports comprehension. If reading is fast but lacks expression, fluency is still limited, even if decoding is correct. Comprehension requires asking questions about meaning, not just how the text is read aloud, and vocabulary knowledge isn’t directly measured by the act of reading aloud. So the playback is most informative for assessing fluency.