Relationship between Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension among ESL Students

Authors

  • Ching Pey Khor Universiti Sains Malaysia
  • Hui Min Low Universiti Sains Malaysia
  • Lay Wah Lee Universiti Sains Malaysia

Keywords:

reading, ESL, fluency, comprehension, assessment

Abstract

Fluency is one of the five components of reading competency alongside with phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary and comprehension. It is related to reading comprehension and it can be used to predict the reading competency of a reader. However, research on such relationship is limited in ESL context. Hence, the purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between three sub-skills of fluency (accuracy, reading rate and prosody) and reading comprehension among a sample of ESL students in a Malaysian school. It also aims to examine the concurrent validity of using the objective (i.e. reading accuracy and rate) and subjective (reading prosody) measures of fluency. It is hoped that the findings could shed light in identifying the possible methods of assessing oral reading fluency in ESL classrooms. The participants were 67 lower secondary school students who learn English as their second language. The students completed a reading comprehension test and then they were asked to read aloud the texts used in the test, individually. The individual reading sessions were audio recorded for the analysis of three sub-skills of reading fluency. Bivariate correlation analysis was then conducted to measure the strength of relationships with reading comprehension. The results revealed that all three sub-skills of fluency were strongly correlated with reading comprehension. Both objective (accuracy and reading rate) and subjective (prosody) rating scales were strongly related, and thus could be used in parallel or interchangeably in the assessment of oral reading fluency. The findings provided evidence that in line with the research findings in English as the first language contexts, reading fluency is closely associated with reading comprehension in an ESL context.  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/GEMA-2014-1403-02 

Author Biographies

Ching Pey Khor, Universiti Sains Malaysia

Khor Ching Pey is a graduate of Master in Education (TESOL) from Universiti Sains Malaysia. She is an English teacher in a secondary school. Her research interest is in reading fluency and reading comprehension.  

Hui Min Low, Universiti Sains Malaysia

Low Hui Min is a Senior lecturer in the School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia. She obtained her doctoral degree from La Trobe University (Australia). Her research areas cover early multilingual development and speech and language remediation for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. She is also a certified speech-language pathologist.  

Lay Wah Lee, Universiti Sains Malaysia

Lee Lay Wah is an Associate Professor in the School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lee has published substantially in international journals. Her research works include studies on reading assessment and remediation for children with Dyslexia and development of award-winning online resources for teachers in special education: http://epkhas.ses.usm.my/ and http://kodbraillebm.ses.usm.my/.

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Published

2014-09-22

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 3 (2014): September 2014

Section

Articles

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