What does Letter-Naming Fluency (LNF) assess?

Letter-Naming Fluency (LNF) specifically measures a student's ability to recognize and name both upper and lowercase letters quickly and accurately. This skill is foundational for early literacy development since it is closely linked to a child's overall ability to read. Mastery of letter recognition is essential as it precedes the ability to decode words and contributes to phonemic awareness.

While phonemic segmentation, understanding of sentence structure, and reading comprehension are all important aspects of literacy development, they are not the primary focus of LNF. Phonemic segmentation deals with breaking words down into individual sounds, sentence structure relates to grammatical understanding, and reading comprehension involves interpreting meaning from text, none of which are assessed by LNF. Therefore, identifying and naming letters is the core aspect evaluated by this assessment.