Initial Evidence That Letter Fluency Tasks Are Valid Indicators of Early Reading Skill

Abstract

This longitudinal investigation evaluated the validity of letter-name fluency (LNF) and nonsense word fluency (NWF) measures as indicators of early reading skill with a sample of 39 kindergarten children.In the spring of kindergarten and first grade, these children responded to a battery of language, readingrelated, and reading measures. Construct and social consequential validity were evaluated through concurrent and predictive criterion-related validity coefficients, multiple regression analyses, and classification analysis. Evidence supportive of validity was found for both fluency measures, with NWF receiving the strongest support. Both fluency measures were more sensitive to poor reader status in first grade than any other measure when reading was defined by oral reading fluency. These findings extend the usefulness of NWF to the early identification of kindergarten students.

Relations among reading skills and sub-skills and text-level reading proficiency in developing readers

“…These statistics support the psychometric adequacy of the tasks for the children in our study. Correlations were in expected directions, with magnitudes in line with those reported in other studies (e.g., Compton, 2000;Speece et al, 2003;Wagner et al, 1994).…”

“…Without the knowledge of how sounds are systematically represented by letters, children cannot successfully decode (e.g., Adams, 1990;Ehri, 1998;Jenkins, Bausell, & Jenkins, 1972;National Reading Panel, 2000). Both phonological awareness and fluency in letter sounds in kindergarten were among the best predictors of first grade oral reading fluency (Speece, Mills, Ritchey, & Hillman, 2003;Stage, Sheppard, Davidson, & Browning, 2001). Automaticity in recognition of phonograms (i.e., letter groups within a word that share a pattern across words) is a feature of the more advanced word recognition characteristic of the consolidated alphabetic reading phase (Ehri, 1992).…”

“…Some researchers have looked at the relation between rate, accuracy, prosody, and reading comprehension (Daane et al, 2005;Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Kuhn, Wisenbaker, & Stahl, 2004) while others have looked at the relation between text reading fluency and reading comprehension (Berninger et al, 2006;Jenkins et al, 2003;Schwanenflugel, Meisinger, Wisenbaker, Kuhn, Strauss, & Morris, 2006). Some have looked at the predictive validity of decoding fluency to text reading fluency in young children (Good, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 2001;Speece et al, 2003;Speece & Ritchey, 2005), while another examined the development of lexical and sub-lexical reading skills and their contributions to text reading fluency in beginning readers (Burke, Crowder, Hagan-Burke, & Zou, 2009), however, to our knowledge, no one has examined the components of text reading fluency in children who are neither established readers nor beginners. Also, among the previously-cited research, Berninger et al, Jenkins et al, and Speece and colleagues have all focused on poor readers while the current study has a wide range of excellent to poor readers.…”

Predictors of reading skills for kindergartners and first grade students in Spanish: a longitudinal study

“…Similar to the role of oral reading fluency in reading comprehension, fluency in sublexical processes frees memory and attention for word reading. Although novice readers employ letter-by-letter analysis of words in the initial stage, automaticity in sublexical processes (i.e., phonological awareness and letter knowledge) allows access and use of information for successful blending of sounds into a word (Speece, Mills, Ritchey, & Hillman, 2003). On the other hand, dysfluent phonemic segmentation and letter knowledge (both of which are critical for grapheme-phoneme translation) might hamper these processes, hindering successful word reading.…”

“…The present study fills this gap in the literature and examined how developmental paths of phonemic segmentation fluency, letter-naming fluency, and vocabulary size (accuracy) are related to growth trajectory of word reading for kindergartners in Chile. It should be noted that letter-naming fluency is distinguished from Rapid Automatized Naming letters task (RAN; Wolf & Denckla, 2005;Wolf & Bowers, 1999) as the RAN letter task uses a few presumably known, frequently occurring letters (i.e., five letters) whereas letter-naming fluency measures use many exemplars (i.e., all the letters of the alphabet) (Speece et al, 2003).…”