Rather than focusing on text reading this month, let’s turn our attention to one of the critical components of language necessary for comprehension: vocabulary.

“What the what?” as Liz Lemon of TV’s 30 Rock might say. Oral reading FLUENCY doesn’t measure reading FLUENCY? How can that be? Well, the answer is … it’s complicated. To fully explain, we should probably begin by revisiting what the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) measure really is. We have to begin back in the early 1980s, when a team of researchers and doctoral students at the University of Minnesota began to explore the idea that simple measures of academic performance could potentially serve as indicators of the academic competence of a student at a particular point in time—and then, perhaps, also be used to monitor the trajectory of skill development over a period of time (Jenkins & Fuchs, 2012).