The oral reading fluency (ORF) subtask measures how quickly and accurately a student can read. It is a core component of EGRA because it brings together lower-level reading skills (such as decoding and familiar word recognition) with how quickly and easily the student can read a given word (called automaticity).

Students were given a short, written passage on a topic that was familiar to them. The story consisted for 57 words in formal Arabic, but without diacritics. They were asked to read it out loud “quickly but carefully” and were given 90 seconds from when they begin to read. The EGRA administrator timed the student, making note of any mistakes the student made while reading the words aloud. Children were scored on this ORF subtask on whether they correctly pronounced the letters in the words, regardless of what short vowels they used for the syllables (without diacritics). The score is reported as correct words per minute (cwpm).