FLUENCY MATTERS: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF ROLE OF FLUENCY IN READING COMPREHENSION AND SPELLING

Linda Siegel, University of British Columbia, Canada Gordana Keresteš, University of Zagreb, Croatia Marika Veisson Tallinn University, Estonia Erland Hjelmquist and Tomas Tjus University of Gothenburg, Sweden This presentation will compare the relative roles of fluency, accuracy, phonological awareness, syntactic awareness and working memory in reading comprehension and spelling in four languages. The four languages are English, Swedish, Estonian and Croatian. These languages vary in the regularity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and complexity of grammatical structure. English is very irregular, especially at the level of vowels and high frequency words, Swedish is fairly regular, and Estonian and Croatian are quite regular. In terms of grammatical complexity English and Swedish are less complex than Croatian and Estonian. Children in these four countries were given similar tests of word and pseudoword reading accuracy and fluency, phoneme deletion, syntactic awareness, working memory and phonological awareness. In each country the children had reading instruction for 1-2 years before the tasks were administered. In each country the children were divided into a group of poor readers and a group of good readers on the basis of word recognition skills. The good readers and the poor readers in each country differed significantly The results indicated that the correlations of fluency measures with reading comprehension and spelling were similar in the four languages. In each language, word reading fluency has a higher correlation with reading comprehension and spelling than accuracy. Although fluency made the highest contribution to reading comprehension and spelling in English, Swedish, and Croatian, the picture was quite different in in Estonian. In Estonian syntactic awareness made the highest contribution to reading comprehension and spelling. Both the complexity of the grammatical structure and fluency or reading word are important factors in reading and understanding connect text.