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Is oral/text reading fluency a “bridge” to reading comprehension?

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Abstract

In the present study we investigated developmental relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, and text reading fluency to reading comprehension in a relatively transparent language, Korean. A total of 98 kindergartners and 170 first graders in Korea were assessed on a series of tasks involving listening comprehension, word reading fluency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Results from multigroup structural equation models showed that text reading fluency was a dissociable construct from word reading fluency for both kindergartners and first graders. In addition, a developmental pattern emerged: listening comprehension was not uniquely related to text reading fluency for first graders, but not for kindergartners, over and above word reading fluency. In addition, text reading fluency was uniquely related to reading comprehension for kindergartners, but not for first graders, after accounting for word reading fluency and listening comprehension. For first graders, listening comprehension dominated the relations. There were no differences in the pattern of relations for skilled and less skilled readers in first grade. Results are discussed from a developmental perspective for reading comprehension component skills including text reading fluency.

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Notes

  1. Although oral reading fluency has been widely used in the literature, we use the term, text reading fluency, to refer to fast and accurate reading of connected text, excluding reading prosody. Please see Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, and Meisinger (2010), and Kuhn and Stahl (2003) for the importance of reading prosody as part of reading fluency definition. We also use the term word reading fluency to refer to the fast and accurate word reading in a list format.

  2. To estimate the extent to which children are likely to interact with orthographically opaque words in written texts, we examined a Korean reading text book for first graders (Korean Ministry of Education). A total of 28 stories (directions for children were excluded) were included in the analysis. These stories included, on average, 208.29 syllables with a large variation (SD = 212.25), ranging from 27 syllables to 790 syllables.

  3. In the word reading fluency tasks, many items consisted of more than one word, but included those that occur together separated by spacing. In Korean, spacing does not occur after each word, but complex (see Kim, Radach, & Vorstius, 2012a; Lee & Ramsey, 2000 for more information). For instance, 아빠가 (dad + a subject case marker) was presented together in an item as found in connected texts.

  4. This is partly due to the agglutinative nature of Korean in which words are formed by joining morphemes together.

  5. When the first two passages were collapsed, Cronbach’s alpha was estimated to be .72. However, in the latent variable approach, we used students’ performance on these two tasks as separate tasks in order to have higher degrees of freedom. When analysis was conducted using two indicators of reading comprehension (i.e., the sum score of tasks 1 and 2, and score for task 3), the results were identical.

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Kim, YS., Park, C.H. & Wagner, R.K. Is oral/text reading fluency a “bridge” to reading comprehension?. Read Writ 27, 79–99 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-013-9434-7

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