What oral text reading fluency can reveal about reading comprehension

Abstract

Text reading fluency – the ability to read quickly, accurately and with a natural intonation – has been proposed as a predictor of reading comprehension. In the current study, we examined the role of oral text reading fluency, defined as text reading rate and text reading prosody, as a contributor to reading comprehension outcomes in addition to decoding efficiency and language comprehension. One hundred and six Dutch primary school children from fourth grade participated in this study and were assessed on decoding efficiency, vocabulary, syntactic ability, reading fluency performance and reading comprehension skills. Regression analysis showed that text reading prosody, not text reading rate, explained additional variance in reading comprehension performance when decoding efficiency and language comprehension were controlled for. This result suggests that the inclusion of text reading prosody as an aspect of text reading fluency is justified and that a natural intonation is associated with better comprehension of what is read.