In the U.S., reading assessments are commonly used to measure children’s educational progress; however, they are often less effective for diverse groups, including adult struggling readers and multilingual learners. This chapter explores the challenges of using timed word reading assessments, which were normed on children, with these populations. We conducted an exploratory study to analyze item-level responses on the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency-Second Edition (TOSWRF-2) and compare multilingual learners and monolingual English speakers, as well as adults and children. Adults were less likely than children to reach items, and multilingual learners were less likely than monolingual English speakers to both reach and perform accurately on the items. These findings emphasize the need for equitable reading assessments that separate speed from accuracy to better measure the abilities of diverse learners. We discuss how these results apply to adult struggling readers and multilingual learners from Romance and non-Romance-language backgrounds, including Korean Hangul.