Effect of Reading Comprehension on Passage Fluency in Spanish and English for Second-Grade English Learners

Passage reading fluency has been investigated as part of research on curriculum-based measurement for many years (Deno, Mirkin, & Chiang, 1982; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Maxwell, 1988; Shinn, 1989), and is an effective overall indicator of English reading performance for students through elementary school, including English learners (ELs) being taught to read in English as a second language (Baker, S. K. & Good, 1995; Dominguez de Ramirez & Shapiro, 2006; Riedel, 2007; Wiley & Deno, 2005). Less research has been conducted on the role of passage fluency in other languages, but preliminary evidence suggests it may be an effective measure of reading performance in Spanish (Abadzi, Crouch, Echegaray, Pasco, & Sampe, 2005; Baker, S. K. & Good, 1995; Dominguez de Ramirez & Shapiro, 2006). Passage fluency is moderately to strongly associated with measures of reading comprehension, a relation that may be reciprocal in nature (Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Meyer & Felton, 1999; Pikulski & Chard, 2005; Torgesen, 2006). We do not yet know how the association between passage fluency and reading comprehension varies by language, including alphabetic languages that differ in their orthographic transparency, such as English and Spanish. English has a relatively deep orthography with many pronunciation ambiguities (e.g., chair and choir have similar spelling but the difference in one vowel changes the pronunciation in all but the final phoneme, Perfetti, 1999). Spanish has a shallow orthography where most letters represent one sound, and where differences in standard pronunciation follow consistent conditional rules (Signorini, 1997). Many studies have examined the role of passage fluency as a predictor of reading comprehension (Baker, S. K. et al., 2008; Deno et al., 1982; Fuchs et al., 1988; Schilling, Carlisle, Scott, & Zeng, 2007; Shinn, 1989; Speece & Ritchey, 2005), but very few studies have examined the effect of reading comprehension on passage fluency (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003; Klauda & Guthrie, 2008). Moreover, we were unable to locate any study that examined the effect of reading comprehension on passage fluency for students learning to read in two languages. Understanding the effect of reading comprehension on passage fluency for this group of students provides a unique opportunity to contribute to the growing knowledge base regarding the role of metacognitive processes in the development of reading fluency for bilingual students. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of reading comprehension on passage fluency in Spanish and English for students being taught to read in both languages. Specifically, we examine the role of reading comprehension on passage fluency after controlling for word reading proficiency. In addition, we examine whether the contribution of reading comprehension on passage fluency is affected by differences in the complexity of the orthographic system (i.e., English vs. Spanish). In the next section, we (a) expand on the differences between the English and Spanish orthographic systems, (b) define passage fluency, and (c) describe the theoretical framework we used to examine the role of reading comprehension on passage fluency. Differences Between English and Spanish Orthographic Systems English and Spanish are alphabetic languages but differ in the complexity of their grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules (Perez-Canado, 2005). Spanish, like Finnish and German, has a transparent orthography where grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are highly consistent. English has a complex orthography where correspondence is less consistent and predictable. Approximately 50% of English words are wholly decodable and another 37% are decodable except for one sound. Approximately 13% of English words are irregular, meaning that rule exceptions cannot guide accurate pronunciation (e.g., rules to correctly read the word was, Hanna, Hanna, Hodges, & Rudorf, 1966). …