Examining the developmental trend of reading fluency in Chinese children’s reading comprehension in a one-year longitudinal study

Abstract

Prior research on alphabetic readers has suggested that reading fluency plays an additional role in children’s development of reading comprehension. Yet, it is unclear whether this relationship can be extended to languages with non-alphabetic writing systems. The present work aimed to examine the language and literacy factors that contribute to reading fluency and how they interact with each other to support children’s reading comprehension in Chinese, a language with morphosyllabic writing system. To examine the developmental effect of reading fluency on children’s reading comprehension skills, Chinese primary school children in Grade 2 to 4 (N = 365) were recruited to participate in this one-year longitudinal study. At Time 1, children completed measures of nonverbal intelligence, word and text reading fluency, word decoding, and reading comprehension measures; children were retested again at Time 2 on all measures except for the nonverbal intelligence measure. Two-way mixed ANOVAs showed that there was a significant developmental difference across time among the three cohorts on their performances on measures of reading comprehension and text reading fluency. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that reading fluency measures were significant longitudinal predictors of children’s reading comprehension. Follow-up cross-sectional analyses on word recognition and word reading fluency showed that reading fluency’s differential roles across different grade cohorts. The present findings suggested a developmental role for reading fluency in predicting Chinese reading comprehension and its role also experiences developmental changes as children’s proficiency and abilities improved.