Text Reading fluency of 2nd grade students with and without developmental dyslexia according to the text presentation type

Abstract

Objectives Reading fluency is an important factor that connects decoding ability and reading comprehension ability. Given that fluent reading is essential for language classes in lower grades of elementary school in Korea, it is necessary to support not only the decoding ability but also student’s reading fluency. This study investigated the differences in reading fluency ability of two groups of children according to text presentation types.
 Methods Thirteen students with developmental dyslexia(DYS) and 13 typically developing students(TD) read two types of decodable texts, sentence-broken type and general type. Reading accuracy, speed and prosody were measured.
 Results DYS revealed lower accuracy and prosody scores than TD, while there were no differences in accuracy and prosody according to text presentation type. DYS took longer time to finish reading texts than TD, while only DYS took longer time to read general type text than sentence-broken type text.
 Conclusions When presenting a text that is decodable to a certain extent to DYS, the text presentation type didn’t seem to matter for reading accuracy, although reading speed was influenced by the presentation type. It seems very important to consider the visuo-spatial presentation format as well as the decodability of the texts to support DYS’s reading fluency meaningfully.