Prosody refers to how a student reads. It includes several things:
Volume. A good reader should be able to change his or her volume to suit the situation; ie, reading quietly when reading to a partner and more loudly when reading to a group.
Phrasing. Sentences are not simply strings of words; they have natural breaks. A good reader pays attention to punctuation, clauses, prepositional phrases, and other word clusters in order to break sentences into phrases.
Intonation. A good reader doesn't read in a monotone. Instead, a good reader moves his or her voice up and down as he or she reads. A question mark sends the voice up; a period sends the voice down.
Expression. When good readers read, they think about what they are reading, and the emotion in their voice matches the emotion in the words. Good readers pay attention to exciting parts, scary parts, sad parts, etc. in the text and change their voices accordingly. This is especially important when students are reading dialogue (characters talking to each other) because spoken words generally carry more emotion than narrated text.
It can be difficult for students to put expression and appropriate phrasing into stories that they haven't seen yet. In order to practice, we frequently read text chorally (as a group) and practice reading poems with expression. Reading and rereading familiar poems - funny, serious, wistful - can be a fun and painless way to begin injecting expression into a student's reading voice. We assess prosody quarterly.