The utility and accuracy of oral reading fluency score types in predicting reading comprehension

This study used data from the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2002) oral reading fluency (ORF) probes to examine variation among different ORF score types (i.e., the median of three passages, the mean of all three passages, the mean of passages 2 and 3, and the score from passage 3) in predicting reading comprehension as a function of student reading fluency level and to compare the screening accuracy of these score types in predicting student reading comprehension. The results revealed that the relation between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension varied as a function of students' oral reading fluency and that different score types had varying predictive validity for year-end reading comprehension. The mean of all three passages demonstrated a marginally better balance in screening efficiency from September to December of grade one (especially for low-performing students), whereas in grades two and three, the median score was the best predictor. Furthermore, across all grades, increasing reading rates were observed for the three administered passages within an assessment period. The observed patterns mimicked previous experimental studies (Francis et al., 2008; Jenkins, Graff, & Miglioretti, 2009), suggesting that practice effects are an important consideration in the administration of multiple passages assessing oral reading fluency.     

Developmental relations between reading fluency and reading comprehension: a longitudinal study from Grade 1 to Grade 2

From a developmental framework, relations among list reading fluency, oral and silent reading fluency, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension might be expected to change as children's reading skills develop. We examined developmental relations among these constructs in a latent-variable longitudinal study of first and second graders. Results showed that list reading fluency was uniquely related to reading comprehension in Grade 1, but not in Grade 2, after accounting for text reading fluency (oral or silent) and listening comprehension. In contrast, text reading fluency was uniquely related to reading comprehension in Grade 2, but not in Grade 1, after accounting for list reading fluency and listening comprehension. When oral reading fluency and silent reading fluency were compared, oral reading fluency was uniquely related to reading comprehension after accounting for silent reading fluency in Grade 1, whereas silent reading fluency was uniquely related to reading comprehension after accounting for oral reading fluency in Grade 2.     

Scotopic sensitivity/Irlen syndrome and the use of coloured filters: a long-term placebo-controlled study of reading strategies using analysis of miscue

This study investigated the long-term effects of using coloured filters on the frequency and type of errors in oral reading. A double-masked, placebo-controlled crossover experimental design was used, with subjects being assessed over a period of 20 months. There were three experimental groups (Placebo tints, Blue tints, and Diagnosed tints) involving 113 subjects with reading difficulties, ranging in age from 9.2 yr. to 13.1 yr. The 35 controls (ranging in age from 9.4 yr. to 12.9 yr.) had reading difficulties but did not require coloured filters. There was a significant improvement for all groups in the accuracy of miscues over the period, although experimental groups over-all did not improve at a significantly different rate than the control group. The failure to find significantly greater improvement for the experimental groups over the control group for the total period, despite subjects' reports of improved print clarity, may be partly related to the lack of effective letter-sound analysis and synthesis skills and to the use of a word-identification strategy of guessing based on partial visual analysis.     

A review of research and theory on the relation between oral reading rate and reading comprehension

We review the conceptual and empirical literature on the relation between oral reading rate and reading comprehension. Three lines of conceptual analysis converge on this relation: (a) application of basic behavior analytic principles suggests that fluent decoding should produce better reading comprehension through direct and indirect relations, (b) behavior analytic understanding of the importance of the rate of behavior as developed by Skinner, Lindsley and Haughton implies that higher reading rate contributes to improved comprehension, and (c) cognitive theory of automaticity explicitly states that high rate reading sets the stage for effective comprehension. A wealth of correlational evidence indicates that reading rate and reading comprehension covary. These results have been replicated across elementary grades and across a variety of measures of reading comprehension. However, experimental analyses have not convincingly demonstrated a functional relation between the two. Experimental work has yielded results that are mixed at best. Examination of experimental design issues shows that although this is not a simple relation to investigate, behavior analysts can make major contributions to understanding the possible functional relation between reading rate and reading comprehension.     

Both concreteness and age-of-acquisition affect reading accuracy but only concreteness affects comprehension in a deep dyslexic patient

As concreteness correlates very highly with the age-of-acquisition (AoA) of words, we attempted to disentangle the effects of these two variables in the oral reading and comprehension performance of the deep dyslexic patient LW. The results of a multiple regression analysis of LW's reading of 217 words showed that both AoA and concreteness affect reading accuracy, with the AoA effect being most apparent for her reading of concrete words. However, concreteness and not AoA affected LW's performance in matching spoken definitions to printed words, both when the distractors were semantically unrelated and when they were related. These data are interpreted in terms of a model of reading in deep dyslexia in which concreteness affects the ease with which semantics are accessed and can activate lexical representations, and AoA affects the ease with which lexical phonology becomes available for spoken word production.     

Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension

This article compares several methods of presenting text, including a new paradigm that produces reading-time data with many of the characteristics of naturally occurring eye-fixation data. In the new paradigm, called the moving window condition, a reader presses a button to see each successive work in a text, and the previous work is removed when a new work appears. The words appear in the same position that they would in normal test, and word-length information is available in peripheral vision. The results are qualitatively and quantitatively compared to the results obtained by monitoring the eye fixations of subjects reading normal text. The word-level effects are generally similar. Readers pause longer on longer words, on less frequent words, on words that introduce a new topic, and at ends of sentences. The results suggest that readers initiate thr processing of each word as soon as they encounter it rather than buffer words and delay processing. Also considered are two other reading-time paradigms, one in which words are cumulatively displayed on the screen and one in which each successive word is presented at the same location on the screen. Finally, we consider how the tendency to immediately process text might interact with other techniques for text presentation, such as the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) condition, and we generate predictions about the nature and limits of the method.     

Speech vs. reading comprehension: an explorative study of gender representations in Norwegian

As research on the construction of a mental representation of referent gender in speech comprehension is scarce, this study examined whether factors identified in reading comprehension exert similar influence in speech comprehension. Conceptually replicating previous research, a sentence continuation evaluation task was set up in two modalities, as a listening task and as a time-confined reading task (i.e. to correspond to the time constraint when listening). In line with previous findings from self-paced reading paradigms we found gender representations in language comprehension to be grounded in the interaction between textual (grammatical) and background (stereotypical) information. Extending previous research, the effect of stereotypical information was however modulated by presentation modality. In all, although speech and reading comprehension share higher-level processes of comprehension, this study provides first evidence that differences in comprehension might occur due to differences such as orthographic access or attention allocation.     

The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the meanings of idioms in context than in isolation. The good and poor comprehenders did not differ in their abilities to interpret transparent idioms in context, but the poor comprehenders were significantly worse at using context to work out the meanings of opaque idioms. The explanation task revealed the source of information used by the children to derive nontarget interpretations. We discuss these findings in relation to idiom processing strategies and Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model.     

Relations between enabling skills and reading comprehension: a follow-up study of Latvian students from first to second grade

In order to examine the relationships among various phonological skills and reading comprehension, Latvian children were followed from grade 1 to grade 2 and were tested with a battery of phonological, word reading, and reading comprehension tasks. A principal component analysis of the phonological tasks revealed three salient factors: a phonemic awareness factor, a rapid naming factor, and a short-term memory factor. In order to analyze the relationship between various phonological skills and reading comprehension, a structural modeling analysis was performed. Phonemic awareness and rapid naming explained approximately the same amount of unique variance in reading comprehension, but phonemic awareness had most predictive power indirectly via word decoding. Only rapid naming had a significant direct impact on reading comprehension.     

A retrospective longitudinal study of cognitive and language skills in poor reading comprehension

Fifty‐six specific poor reading comprehenders (SPRC) were selected in Grade 4 and retrospectively compared to good comprehenders at preschool (age 5) and at the end of kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. The results revealed deficits in vocabulary, grammar, verbal memory and early deficits in phonological awareness in most of the SPRC sample, beginning in preschool. The reading comprehension deficits in children with SPRC were not as marked in earlier assessments in Grade 1 and 2, probably because of the greater dependence on word decoding in reading comprehension in the early grades.     

小学儿童词汇知识与阅读理解的关系：交叉滞后研究

对小学1、3、5年级共399名学生进行为期1年的追踪测查, 使用交叉滞后模型检验小学低、中、高年级儿童词汇知识与阅读理解的关系。在控制了语音意识、语素意识、一般认知能力和自回归效应之后, 结果发现：在小学低年级, 词汇知识与阅读理解之间未发现显著的纵向预测关系; 在中年级, 词汇知识和阅读理解存在显著的双向预测关系; 在高年级, T1的阅读理解能够显著预测T2的词汇知识, 而T1的词汇知识对T2阅读理解的预测作用不显著。研究结果表明词汇知识与阅读理解的关系在小学不同年级段存在不同的模式, 这一发现支持了阅读发展阶段论, 并对阅读三角理论进行了一定的补充。     

Prosody instruction intervention as a means to improved reading comprehension

The relationship between prosody and comprehension, previously demonstrated in K–12 students, was examined in university students enrolled in first‐year writing classes. Students completed the Gray Oral Reading Test‐5 both before and after an expressive reading intervention (ER) or no oral reading instruction (NI). Throughout the semester, the ER students marked an excerpt of text for prosodic signals and read it aloud with a partner. Training and practice in expressive reading led to a significant improvement in the normed Oral Reading Index score. Specifically, ER participants demonstrated improved accuracy, fluency, and reading comprehension in comparison with NI participants. The significant relationship between accuracy and comprehension in the ER condition suggests that expressive reading instruction strengthened student ability to read words accurately and, in turn, comprehend the material better than students in the NI condition. Expressive reading practices are recommended to engage students more deeply with the text.     

Phonemic effects in reading comprehension and text memory

Two experiments investigated the role of phonemic information in adult reading comprehension and replicated the visual tongue-twister effect in a new paradigm–a modified probe memory task. College students took longer to read sentences that repeated word initial consonants (tongue-twisters) than matched control sentences. Equally important, subjects also took longer to respond to probe words from tongue-twisters. Slower response times in both the sentence reading task and the probe memory task indicate that the tongue-twister effect is indeed phonemic in nature and that phonemic information is used in memory during comprehension.     

Working memory and updating processes in reading comprehension

In this study, we examine the relation between reading comprehension ability and success in working memory updating tasks. Groups of poor and good comprehenders, matched for logical reasoning ability, but different in reading comprehension ability, were administered various updating tasks in a series of experiments. In the first experiment, the participants were presented with lists of words, the length of which (4-10 words) was unknown beforehand, and were required to remember the last 4 words in each series. In this task, we found a decrease in performance that was related to longer series and poor reading ability. In the second experiment, we presented lists of nouns referring to items of different sizes, in a task that simulated the selection and updating of relevant information that occurs in the on-line comprehension process. The participants were required to remember a limited, predefined number of the smallest items presented. We found that poor comprehenders not only had a poorer memory, but also made a greater number of intrusion errors. In the third and fourth experiments, memory load (number of items to be selected) and suppression request (number of potentially relevant items) were manipulated within subjects. Increases in both memory load and suppression requests impaired performance. Furthermore, we found that poor comprehenders produced a greater number of intrusion errors, particularly when the suppression request was increased. Finally, in a fifth experiment, a request to specify the size of presented items was introduced. Poor comprehenders were able to select the appropriate items, although their recall was poorer. Altogether, the data show that working memory abilities, based on selecting and updating relevant information and avoiding intrusion errors, are related to reading comprehension.     

Assessment matters: Issues in the measurement of reading comprehension

Background. The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997 ) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits. Aims and methods. An evaluation of the NARA measurement of word reading and reading comprehension level was undertaken in relation to models of reading ability. Appropriate control measures were considered. The strengths and weaknesses of different forms of reading comprehension were also evaluated. Results. Previous research into reading comprehension difficulties using the NARA has adopted satisfactory control measures in relation to word reading ability. There are limitations associated with all the considered forms of reading comprehension assessment. Conclusions. If administered and interpreted appropriately, the NARA is an effective instrument for researchers and practitioners who need to assess both word reading accuracy and reading comprehension and to identify children with a dissociation between these two aspects of reading.