The Effect Of Fluency Oriented Reading Instructionon EFL Students’Reading Fluency And Comprehension

We write this on the eve of the publishing of the 2019 What's Hot in Literacy Report, which is the result of a biennial survey completed by the International Literacy Association (in press) that takes the temperature of the literacy dialogue and notes the changing trends from year to year. This year, topics such as identifying effective instructional strategies for struggling learners; building early literacy skills through a balanced approach; increasing equity and opportunities; providing access to highquality, diverse books and content; and increasing professional learning represented the topics that respondents felt were particularly trending this past year. (The 2019 report will be available online very soon at https ://liter acywo rldwi de.org/get-resou rces/whats-hot-report.) These topics raise important questions that link research, theory, and practice. In this issue, we ask questions similar to these: What kinds of activities, instructional approaches, or knowledge about language are useful for becoming literate? How do these different experiences and understandings contribute to language and literacy learning?

Foreword, Lesley Mandel Morrow. Part I: Instructional Trends. How Shall Research Inform Reading Instruction?: The Legacy of Steven A. Stahl, Michael C. McKenna. Whole Language and Language Experience Approaches for Beginning Reading: A Quantitative Research Synthesis, Steven A. Stahl, Patricia D. Miller. Fostering the Scientific Study of Reading Instruction by Example, Keith E. Stanovich, Paula J. Stanovich. Understanding Shifts in Reading and Its Instruction, Steven A. Stahl. The Shift from Polarization in Reading: Relying on Research Rather than Compromise, Timothy Shanahan. Part II: Reading Acquisition. Phonics and Phonemic Awareness, Marilyn Jager Adams, Jean Osborn. Defining Phonological Awareness and its Relationship to Early Reading, Steven A. Stahl, Bruce A. Murray. Hunting the Elusive Phoneme: A Phoneme-Direct Model for Learning Phoneme Awareness, Bruce A. Murray. Everything You Wanted to Know about Phonics (but Were Afraid to Ask), Steven A. Stahl, Ann M. Duffy-Hester, Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl. More about Phonics: Findings and Reflections, Linnea C. Ehri. Part III: Fluency. Seeking Understanding about Reading Fluency: The Contributions of Steven A. Stahl, Timothy Rasinski, James Hoffman. Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction, Steven A. Stahl, Kathleen Heubach. Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction: A Merging of Theory and Practice, Melanie R. Kuhn, Paula J. Schwanenflugel. Part IV: Vocabulary. The State of Vocabulary Research in the Mid-1980s, William Nagy, Judith A. Scott. The Effects of Vocabulary Instruction: A Model-Based Meta-Analysis, Steven A. Stahl, Marilyn M. Fairbanks. Issues in the Advancement of Vocabulary Instruction: Response to Stahl and Fairbanks's Meta-Analysis. Margaret McKeown, Isabel L. Beck. Part V: Comprehension. Comprehension Research over the Past Three Decades, Richard C. Anderson, Qiuying Wang, Janet S. Gaffney. Prior Knowledge and Difficult Vocabulary in the Comprehension of Unfamiliar Text, Steven A. Stahl, Michael G. Jacobson, Charlotte E. Davis, Robin L. Davis. Improving Students' Reading Comprehension, Barbara M. Taylor, P. David Pearson, Georgia Earnest Garcia, Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl, Eurydice B. Bauer. What Happens When Students Read Multiple Source Documents in History? Steven A. Stahl, Cynthia R. Hynd, Bruce K. Britton, Mary M. McNish, Dennis Bosquet. Reading Multiple Documents in History Class: Evolution of a Teaching Strategy Based on the Reading Processes of Practicing Historians, Cynthia Hynd Shanahan. Part VI: Assessment. Connecting Scientific and Practical Approaches to Reading Assessment, Scott G. Paris. An Educational Model of Assessment and Targeted Instruction for Children with Reading Problems, Steven A. Stahl, Melanie R. Kuhn, J. Michael Pickle. Intelligent Action as the Basis for Literacy Instruction in Classroom and Clinical Settings, Marjorie Y. Lipson. The Word Factors: A Problem for Reading Comprehension Assessment, Steven A. Stahl, Elfrieda H. Hiebert. Making the Invisible Visible: The Development of a Comprehension Assessment System, Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl, Georgia Earnest Garcia, Eurydice B. Bauer, P. David Pearson, Barbara M. Taylor. Epilogue, Michael C. McKenna.

Purpose This study examined resilience mechanisms influencing Grade 9 reading fluency and reading comprehension skills. Performance in reading fluency and comprehension in Grade 1 (age 7–8 years) was considered a risk factor for Grade 9 (age 15–16 years) reading performance. We focused on the potential promotive and protective effects of cognitive skills, motivational and parental factors, and gender on reading. Promotive factors benefit all individuals regardless of their level of risk, while protective factors generate more benefit for individuals at higher risk compared with those at lower risk. Method Data from a longitudinal Finnish sample of approximately 2,000 individuals were analyzed. Promotive and protective factors were examined separately for reading fluency and comprehension. Promotive factors were identified as main effects while controlling for Grade 1 performance. Protective factors were identified based on significant interactions with the risk factor, i.e. Grade 1 reading fluency and comprehension skills, and the signaling of gap-closing effects between those at lower and higher risk. Results Most examined skills and factors were identified as promotive factors for reading fluency and comprehension. Four protective factors emerged for reading fluency: pre-literacy skills, arithmetic fluency, oral language, and homework persistence. Oral language was identified as a protective factor for reading comprehension. Two additional significant interactions emerged for reading fluency: parental teaching of reading and parental support with reading-related homework, but they did not conform to the classic protective factor model. Conclusion This study advances the application of constructs indicating resilience in reading research and sheds light on factors that provide promotive and protective support for early reading skills development.

Contemporary approaches to the study of reading comprehension examine how multiple cognitive skills are interconnected. Within this framework, the aim of the present study was to explore the relationships between core executive functions, oral language skills and reading fluency in their effect on reading comprehension. A sample of 78 children in 5th and 6th grade of primary school were tested on reading comprehension and fluency, as well as on working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, vocabulary, oral comprehension and fluid intelligence. Correlation, hierarchical regression, and mediation analyses were conducted. The results show that working memory predicts reading comprehension, even when controlled for oral language skills. However, when reading fluency is introduced into the model, only vocabulary and reading fluency are significant predictors. The mediation analysis shows that reading fluency is a complete mediator of the effect of working memory on reading comprehension. In addition, vocabulary was found to be a relevant predictor of reading comprehension, even controlling for other skills. These findings show that it is crucial to assess interactions between multiple cognitive processes when studying written language comprehension. Furthermore, they suggest that one way in which executive functions affect reading comprehension is indirect and that reading fluency mediates this relationship.

This study aimed to develop the Reading Fluency and Comprehension Supplemental Education Program (OKA2DEP) and investigate the effects on reading fluency and comprehension skills of students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) in Turkey. OKA2DEP is the abbreviation of the Turkish name of the program and OKA stands for both reading fluency and reading comprehension and therefore had 2 as a superscript number. DEP stands for Supplemental Education Program. OKA2DEP contains the keyword/mnemonic, repeated reading and story map strategies, and the word cards exercises. The changing criterion design, which belongs to the single subject designs, was used for the study. Social validity data were collected through subjective evaluation and social comparison. Results showed that OKA2DEP was effective in developing participants’ reading fluency and comprehension and that they were able to maintain these skills one, two and three months after completing the implementation. Findings indicated that participants and their parents were satisfied with the effects of OKA2DEP, but participating students’ reading levels were still behind their peers without disabilities.

This study aimed to examine the effect of interactive reading aloud (IRA) lessons on students’ reading comprehension levels, reading motivation, and reading fluency skills. A mixed experimental design was used to model the study. This study was conducted in a Turkish public school in the academic year 2017–2018, with 62 second-grade students, 22 in the first experimental group, 20 in the second experimental group, and 20 in the control group, and it lasted for 11 weeks. The IRA lessons within the research scope were performed by the researcher in one experimental group and by a second-grade teacher who was responsible for the class itself in the other experimental group. Reading Comprehension Rubric, Motivation to Read Profile scale, and Rubric for Reading Prosody were used as the data collection tool. The findings of the study revealed that reading comprehension, reading motivation, and reading fluency levels of the students in the experimental groups were higher than those of the students in the class, where lessons were taught on the basis of the current Turkish lesson curriculum. Furthermore, it was determined that IRA practices improved students’ levels of reading comprehension, reading motivation and reading fluency skills, independently of the practitioner.

This study examined the independent contribution of morphological awareness and orthographic awareness in reading comprehension, controlling for working memory and reading fluency in Arabic-speaking children. Participants (N = 244) from grades four and five, were classified into typical comprehenders (n = 207) and poor comprehenders (n = 37). All the participants underwent reading comprehension tasks (sentence comprehension and reading maze), orthographic awareness tasks (word choice and parsing), morphological awareness test (root morpheme awareness), working memory test (listening sentence span), word reading fluency, and word reading accuracy and fluency (reading in one minute). The results indicated that morphological awareness and orthographic awareness contributed significantly to reading comprehension (composite scores) only in the typical comprehenders group. Although morphological awareness showed significant predictive relation with reading comprehension, orthographic awareness was a stronger predictor of reading comprehension while controlling for working memory and reading fluency. The findings are discussed, and future directions for research are suggested.

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity)-how its relation to other constructs (e.g., word reading fluency and reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word reading fluency and reading comprehension. We examined (1) developmentally changing relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (2) the relation of reading comprehension to text reading fluency; (3) unique emergent literacy predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, letter name knowledge, vocabulary) of text reading fluency vs. word reading fluency; and (4) unique language and cognitive predictors (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, theory of mind) of text reading fluency vs. reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data (two timepoints; Mean age = 5;24 & 6;08) from Korean-speaking children (N = 143). Results showed that listening comprehension was related to text reading fluency at time 2, but not at time 1. At both times text reading fluency was related to reading comprehension, and reading comprehension was related to text reading fluency over and above word reading fluency and listening comprehension. Orthographic awareness was related to text reading fluency over and above other emergent literacy skills and word reading fluency. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were independently related to text reading fluency and reading comprehension whereas theory of mind was related to reading comprehension, but not text reading fluency. These results reveal developmental nature of relations and mechanism of text reading fluency in reading development.

Guided reading (GR) approach has been shown to have positive effect on reading fluency and comprehension. However, most studies on GR have focused on primary schools, specifically the Foundation Phase. Therefore, this study employed the GR approach to examine its possible effects on the reading proficiencies of Grade 9 English Second Language (ESL) learners in Gauteng province. Social and cognitive constructivism underpinned the study, which employed action research to determine the possible effects of implementing GR on the reading proficiencies of a sample of eight Grade 9 ESL learners who were purposively selected to participate in this study. Data were collected through interviews, observations, and reflection cards, oral and written reading tests. Results indicated that GR approach had caused a significant improvement in these learners’ reading fluency and comprehension because of collaborative learning and scaffolding. In addition, GR also developed a sense of ownership in their learning, a sense of community and innovative and inquisitive minds. The study recommends that learners who struggle with reading be identified early, and GR intervention strategies be implemented and monitored. Every school needs to have a reading policy and the Education Department should ensure that it is implemented and monitored. Keywords: guided reading, reading proficiencies, reading fluency, reading comprehension, second language

Reading fluency is a major determinant of reading comprehension but depends on moderating factors such as auditory working memory (AWM), word recognition and sentence reading skills. We investigated how word and sentence reading skills relate to reading comprehension differentially across the first 6 years of schooling and tested which reading variable best predicted teacher judgements. We conducted our research in a rather transparent language, namely, German, drawing on two different data sets. The first was derived from the normative sample of a reading comprehension test (ELFE‐II), including 2056 first to sixth graders with readings tests at the word, sentence and text level. The second sample included 114 students from second to fourth grade. The latter completed a series of tests that measured word and sentence reading fluency, pseudoword reading, AWM, reading comprehension, self‐concept and teacher ratings. We analysed the data via hierarchical regression analyses to predict reading comprehension and teacher judgements. The impact of reading fluency was strongest in second and third grade, afterwards superseded by sentence comprehension. AWM significantly contributed to reading comprehension independently of reading fluency, whereas basic decoding skills disappeared after considering fluency. Students' AWM and reading comprehension predicted teacher judgements on reading fluency. Reading comprehension judgements depended both on the students' self‐concept and reading comprehension. Our results underline that the role of word reading accuracy for reading comprehension quickly diminishes during elementary school and that teachers base their assessments mainly on the current reading comprehension skill.

This study aimed to examine the relationship between fourth-graders' reading fluency, reading comprehension and attention. It was conducted using the relational screening model and included 132 fourth-graders with grade level adequate reading skills. The study results showed that good readers' attention had significant effects on reading speed, prosody, word recognition and comprehension, respectively. There is also a higher level of relationship between attention, reading speed and prosody. To improve good readers' prosodic reading skills and increase their reading speeds, attention-enhancing activities are needed.

The low reading fluency skills among third-grade students in Indonesian language learning at SDN 20 Kalumbuk serve as the background of this study, given that strong reading ability is essential to support comprehension and overall academic success. This research aims to examine the effect of the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) model assisted by animated video media on students’ reading fluency skills. A quasi-experimental design was employed using a non-equivalent posttest-only control group design. The population included all third-grade students, with Class IIIB as the experimental group using the ORF model assisted by animated videos, and Class IIIA as the control group receiving conventional instruction using similar media. The instrument used was a reading fluency skills test assessed through a rubric covering aspects of pausing, intonation, vocal expression, and reading comprehension. Data analysis was conducted using a t-test, which showed a significance value (2-tailed) of 0.021 < 0.05, indicating a significant difference between the two groups. The study concludes that the application of the ORF model assisted by animated video significantly improves students’ reading fluency. The findings imply that the ORF model can serve as a strategic alternative in Indonesian language instruction to enhance literacy skills at the elementary school level.

The ability to read in second or foreign language (L2/FL) is a vital skill for academic and autonomous language learning. This study investigates the reading performance of two TEFL students from different language backgrounds on two English texts and their equivalent Persian translations comparing their reading rate and comprehension in L1 and L2. A combination of think-aloud protocol, interview and observation methods was used in order to figure out the reading strategies used by each participant in the process of reading and comprehending each text. First, participants were asked to model the steps of their thinking when reading the same text and to discuss what strategies and process they went through while interacting with the passage. Then, they were asked to respond some questions at the end of each reading passage. Last, an interview about their reading experiences and strategies is conducted. Findings of collected data from multiple sources were examined in the sense that the overall extracted themes were triangulated. The data were analyzed based on the Uso-Juan, Esther and Alicia Martinez-Flor (2006) framework for key reading strategies. The result showed that there is a positive relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension. The most effective strategies employed by each participant were also reported. Through critically and analytically reflecting on differences between L1 and L2 reading, language learners can learn how to read so as to get the most out of their academic materials.

This study investigates the effect of the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) model on the reading comprehension skills of fifth-grade students at SDN 101600 Purbabangun, a public elementary school located in Sukamulia, Padang Lawas Utara Regency, North Sumatra Province. In this school, many students demonstrate fluency in reading but face difficulties in comprehending texts critically. The research employed a quantitative approach using a quasi-experimental method with a nonequivalent control group design. A total of 40 fifth-grade students were selected through purposive sampling and divided into two groups: an experimental group taught using the PBL model and a control group taught using conventional methods. Data were collected through pre-tests, post-tests, classroom observations, and student response questionnaires. An independent sample t-test was used for data analysis at a 5% significance level. The results showed a significant difference in reading comprehension between the two groups, with a p-value of 0.0424 (p < 0.05). These findings demonstrate that the PBL model effectively enhances students’ reading comprehension, particularly in developing their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The study emphasizes the need for innovative and student-centered learning approaches to address reading challenges in elementary schools.

This study investigates the influence of Chinese morphological awareness and reading fluency on reading comprehension, as well as the mediating role of reading fluency.The participants were 169 Uyghur children.Regression analysis was employed to examine the predictive effects of homophone morphological awareness and reading fluency on reading comprehension.The results revealed that both homophone morphological awareness and reading fluency had relatively stable predictive effects on reading comprehension.Additionally, homophone morphological awareness also had a certain predictive effect on reading fluency.It was found that morphological awareness can influence reading comprehension through reading fluency.These findings highlight the important role of Chinese morphological awareness in reading comprehension and its promotion through reading fluency.Therefore, schools and teachers in minority areas can enhance students' reading comprehension abilities by strengthening their morphological awareness and reading fluency.