The ability to understand and write texts in academic language is one of the core skills in an information society. An effortless command of lower-order skills is a key prerequisite for higher-order reading and writing proficiency: only a person who is able to read and write texts fluently will have sufficient free cognitive capacity to cope with demanding tasks such as the understanding or planning of texts.

Nonetheless, not all pupils have an adequate command of lower-order skills, with the result that they are unable to cope on their own with many everyday tasks in the classroom, regardless of the subject being taught. To address this, these skills need to be appropriately assessed and the right support provided. There is a lack of relevant assessment tools and intervention programmes in the German-speaking world, however, and this is particularly true in secondary education.

The research project Reading and writing fluency – conceptualization, assessment and support therefore aims first to develop suitable methods for assessing reading and writing fluency in secondary education; these will be made available as assessment tools for educational practice and for further research, but will also be needed for an interventional approach that is to be designed and implemented in the second project phase. The test and intervention are targeted at pupils whose first or second language is German. The expected scientific findings include in particular insights into the relationships between lower- and higher-order skills and between reading and writing skills.

Reading and writing fluency – conceptualization, assessment and support is a joint project of the Mercator Institute for Literacy and Language Education and of Professor Hilde Haider at the Department of Psychology at the University of Cologne. The project is designed to run for three years and is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of the joint governmental and federal initiative Education through Language and Literacy (ELaL).