ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the research in which oral and silent reading have been compared. The two modes of reading are compared on the following features: nature of the text, characteristics of the readers, eye movements, reading speed, and comprehension and memory. Oral reading took more time and required a larger number of fixations than did reading silently. Oral reading—reading aloud—is easily arranged and observed, but researchers and practitioners are rarely interested in oral reading for its own sake but most often as observable behavior that may provide information about the process of silent reading. Oral reading is slower than silent reading, possibly because it may require more regressions in order to remember the earlier text. Early researchers characterized good and poor readers in terms of their “perception accuracy,” but it is difficult to know what they meant by this archaic concept. They were saying that good readers are less bound by the text, whereas poor readers attend to small units.
