Measure Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension in International Reading Efforts

In their commentary, Abadzi and Centanni continue a much-needed dialogue about the use of correctwords perminute (CWPM) tomeasure reading success. We agree that it is important to consider psycholinguistic and cultural factors in developing evidence-based evaluation tools for global literacy initiatives. We support Abadzi and Centanni's contention that such notions must be debated within our scholarly and policy-making communities and across disciplines. In that spirit, Dowd and Bartlett invited two neurocognitive scientists, Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud, to join in this response. Before addressing specific critiques, we remind readers that fluency entails accuracy, automaticity, and prosody; it is inaccurate to claim that CWPM captures fluency comprehensively (Rasinski and Hoffman 2003; Kuhn et al. 2010).