TY - JOUR

T1 - Silent reading fluency and comprehension in bilingual children

AU - O'Brien, Beth A.

AU - Wallot, Sebastian

PY - 2016/8/31

Y1 - 2016/8/31

N2 - This paper focuses on reading fluency by bilingual primary school students, and the relation of text fluency to their reading comprehension. Group differences were examined in a cross-sectional design across the age range when fluency is posed to shift from word-level to text-level. One hundred five bilingual children from primary grades 3, 4, and 5 were assessed for English word reading and decoding fluency, phonological awareness, rapid symbol naming, and oral language proficiency with standardized measures. These skills were correlated with their silent reading fluency on a self-paced story reading task. Text fluency was quantified using non-linear analytic methods: recurrence quantification and fractal analyses. Findings indicate that more fluent text reading appeared by grade 4, similar to monolingual findings, and that different aspects of fluency characterized passage reading performance at different grade levels. Text fluency and oral language proficiency emerged as significant predictors of reading comprehension.

AB - This paper focuses on reading fluency by bilingual primary school students, and the relation of text fluency to their reading comprehension. Group differences were examined in a cross-sectional design across the age range when fluency is posed to shift from word-level to text-level. One hundred five bilingual children from primary grades 3, 4, and 5 were assessed for English word reading and decoding fluency, phonological awareness, rapid symbol naming, and oral language proficiency with standardized measures. These skills were correlated with their silent reading fluency on a self-paced story reading task. Text fluency was quantified using non-linear analytic methods: recurrence quantification and fractal analyses. Findings indicate that more fluent text reading appeared by grade 4, similar to monolingual findings, and that different aspects of fluency characterized passage reading performance at different grade levels. Text fluency and oral language proficiency emerged as significant predictors of reading comprehension.

KW - Empirical education research

KW - Psychology

KW - Bilingual readers

KW - Comprehension

KW - Fractal analysis

KW - Recurrence quantification analysis

KW - Silent reading

KW - Text reading fluency

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84988358725&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01265

DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01265

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 27630590

AN - SCOPUS:84988358725

VL - 7

JO - Frontiers in Psychology

JF - Frontiers in Psychology

SN - 1664-1078

IS - AUG

M1 - 01265

ER -