Cross‐Lagged Relations Among Linguistic Skills in European Portuguese: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Research has widely demonstrated the contribution of word reading, listening comprehension skills, and oral reading fluency to reading comprehension performance. However, the existence of reciprocal relations among these skills has been investigated less frequently. The authors examined the directionality of the relations among reading comprehension, listening comprehension, word reading, and oral reading fluency in Portuguese elementary school students from second to fourth grade by using a longitudinal cross‐lagged design. The sample was composed of 261 students assessed at the end of grades 2, 3, and 4. The results indicated that there is a reciprocal relation between listening comprehension and reading comprehension in every grade and that oral reading fluency and reading comprehension have a reciprocal relation only in the initial years of schooling, similar to the observed relation between oral reading fluency and word reading. The results are discussed considering their potential impact and the limitations of the study.

Longitudinal Stability of Reading Difficulties: Examining the Effects of Measurement Error, Cut-Offs, and Buffer Zones in Identification

“…According to the verbal efficiency theory (Perfetti, 1985), good reading fluency skills facilitate reading comprehension because automaticity in decoding reduces the resource demands of cognitive processes (e.g., memory and attention), which can then be allocated to comprehension. The strength of the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension diminishes over time (Florit and Cain, 2011;Torppa et al, 2016;Santos et al, 2019) as children become "fluent enough". This finding is in accordance with the Simple View of Reading (SVR) model (Gough and Tunmer, 1986;Hoover and Gough, 1990), which states that reading comprehension is a product of two separable abilities -decoding and linguistic comprehension.…”

The Simple View of Reading in Children Acquiring a Regular Orthography (Italian): A Network Analysis Approach

“…Our data support the SVR model also in learners of transparent orthography, specifying that the word recognition component has to contemplate a measure of reading fluency, intended as rate of reading, together with reading accuracy. Findings are consistent with results obtained both in transparent (e.i., Tilstra et al, 2009;Protopapas et al, 2012), intermediate orthographies (such as French, i.e., Massonnié et al, 2019; European Portuguese, i.e., Cadime et al, 2017;Santos et al, 2020) and opaque orthographies (e.g., Joshi and Aaron, 2000;Kershaw and Schatschneider, 2012;Silverman et al, 2013) that support the necessity to add a fluency component to the SVR. After all, fluent reading is the result of a number of processes, that interact each other, and that need be curried out efficiently and automatically (Breznitz, 2006).…”

“…The SVR model has been widely tested in readers of English, a highly opaque orthography, but also in readers of intermediate orthographies (such as French, i.e., Massonnié et al, 2019 ; European Portuguese, i.e., Cadime et al, 2017 ; Santos et al, 2020 ; see also Sparks and Patton, 2016 for Spanish L2 learners and Buil-Legaz et al, 2016 for Spanish-Catalan bilingual children with language deficits) as well as more transparent alphabetic scripts such as Finnish (e.g., Torppa et al, 2016 ), Greek (e.g., Protopapas et al, 2012 , 2013 ; Kendeou et al, 2013 ) and Italian (e.g., Roch and Levorato, 2009 ; Tobia and Bonifacci, 2015 ). Evidence is also available for readers of some non-alphabetic writing systems, such as Chinese and Arabic (e.g., Joshi et al, 2012 ; Yeung et al, 2016 ; Asadi et al, 2017 ).…”

Improving Reading Instruction and Students’ Reading Skills in the Early Grades: Evidence From a Randomized Evaluation in Haiti

“…A number of studies have explored the empirical and theoretical links between oral reading fluency and reading competence (see, e.g., Eason, Sabatini, Goldberg, Bruce, & Cutting, 2013; García & Cain, 2014; Kim, Wagner, & Foster, 2011; Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, 2012; Silverman, Speece, Harring, & Ritchey, 2013; Tilstra, McMaster, Van den Broek, Kendeou, & Rapp, 2009). Research has suggested that in more transparent orthographies such as Creole, oral reading fluency plays an even larger role in reading comprehension than in reading accuracy (Cadime et al, 2017; Padeliadu & Antoniou, 2014; Santos, Cadime, Viana, & Ribeiro, 2019; Seguin, 2018). When students are able to read words with accuracy and speed, cognitive constraints are lifted, “allowing cognitive resources (e.g., working memory, attention) to be used for higher order meaning construction” (Kim, 2015, p. 460) that is needed for reading comprehension.…”