Research indicates that repeated reading improves students' reading fluency. Although found to be effective, the underlying reading processes impacted by the intervention remains unclear. Two theoretical rationales, automatic word processing and the contextual linguistic effect, explaining repeated reading's effectiveness have been advanced in the literature but have yet to be empirically validated. The purpose of this study was to ascertain if practice with connected text is a critical component of repeated reading for fluency improvement. Overall, results from this analysis indicate that reading words in context increases reading speed and word recognition more than reading words out of context. (Contains 1 figure, 3 tables and 3 footnotes.)