**Table 10. Correlations between Fluency and Comprehension (Spearman Rho, N=475)**

|||||**Oral Test**||**Written**<br>**Test**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||||**Fluency**|**Recall**<br>**Comp.**|**Q&A**<br>**Comp.**|**Rasch**<br>**scores**|
|||Fluency|1||||
|**Individual**|**Oral Test**|Recall Comprehension**|0.3215*|1|||
|**Correlations**||Q&A Comprehension**|0.2592*|0.5724*|1||
||**Written Test**|Rasch scores|0.4705*|0.2386*|0.1999*|1|
|||Fluency|1||||
|**School**<br>**Clti**|**Oral Test**|Recall Comprehension**|0.3469*|1|||
|**orreaons**<br>*******||Q&A Comprehension**|0.2160|0.3892*|1||
||**Written Test**|Rasch scores|0.5631*|0.3370*||1|

* Sig. p<0.01. Coefficients that are not significant at p<0.1 are not shown in the table. ** N=431 *** Calculated from school means

To further evaluate the relationship between fluency and comprehension, we use a non-parametric correlation coefficient (Spearman Rho), because the distributions are not normal. We calculate the correlations both at the individual level and at the school level (Table 10). The relationship is significant and positive, as it was expected, but lower in magnitude than what has been found in other studies. There could be several explanations for this, including the sample size (much larger than other studies) and limitations of the written test in the sample. We will address this later in the discussion.

Another interesting –and perhaps more important– point is that the correlation between the fluency test and the written test total score (r=0.47) is higher than the average correlation between any item in the written test and the rest of the items in the written test (r=0.28), or than the average item-test correlation (r=0.4). Moreover, the correlation between oral fluency and the overall written test is higher than all but 3 out of the 19 item-test constructs in the written test (Table 32, in Annex 7.9). All this suggests that if a simple measure of oral fluency (or perhaps fluency using some other method) were to be considered part of a combined oral-written testing approach, the overall test would be perhaps superior to the written test _without_ the oral test. In fact, when including a dichotomic fluency variable (45 words per minute) as an additional item in the ECE test the internal reliability increases slightly, from α =0.74 to α = 0.757 (see Annex 7.9), which indicates that the test has high internal consistency.

In addition, the correlation between comprehension in the oral test and comprehension in the written test is low, and fluency has a stronger correlation with comprehension in the written test than with comprehension in the oral test. This all suggests that this particular measure of oral comprehension may not have predictive nor concurrent validity, in the sense that it is not a good predictor of oral fluency and it does not relate strong enough with a different measure of the same construct.

In most cases, correlations at the school level are stronger than at the individual level, although the differences are not very high. While this difference could be explained in part by the fact that the school average eliminates outliers, it also points out the need for more analysis at the school level. On the other hand, the reduced and less significant correlations between the Q&A comprehension and the other variables can be explained by the also reduced variance of the Q&A scores (0.46 with a mean of 4.2, compared to 1.02 with a mean of 4.3 at the individual level).

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