The Effects of Repeated Readings and Attentional Cues on Reading Fluency and Comprehension

Abstract

The failure of some researchers to find improved reading comprehension with increased fluency may result from the assumption that readers automatically shift attention to comprehension when fluency is established. Research on cuing readers to a purpose in reading suggests that a simple cue about comprehension may be sufficient to prompt this attentional shift. In this study, the effects of repeated readings and attentional cues on measures of reading fluency and comprehension were examined. Thirty third graders read separate passages one, three, and seven times following cues to attend to either reading rate or meaning. After the final reading of each passage, the students retold as much of the story as they could. Fluency and proportion of story propositions retold were analyzed in repeated measures analyses of variance. Significant main effects for both repeated readings and attentional cues were obtained on both dependent measures. Thus, both fluency and comprehension increased as the number of repeated readings increased. In addition, readers cued to fluency read faster but comprehended less than those cued to comprehension. These results suggest that increasing fluency is a less efficient means of improving comprehension than presenting cues about comprehension. 129

Effects of Feedforward Video Self-Modelling on Reading Fluency and Comprehension

“…They found that fluency was greatest when the new passage contained overlapping words and there were no fluency effects when the words in the passage were not overlapping (Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985). Both of these studies show the effectiveness of repeated reading in improving reading fluency of this text (O'Shea et al, 1987;Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985).…”

“…O'Shea, Sindelar and O'Shea (1987) found that students who re-read the same text seven times read at a greater fluency rate than those who only read the passage once, twice or three times. Rashotte and Torgesen (1985) state that for repeated reading to be effective in improving reading fluency over a seven day period each passage must be read four times before the child is presented with the next passage.…”

Differences in Mean Number of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant Words Decoded between Letter-Sound Readers and Non Letter-Sound Readers

“…However, the majority of the early studies found repeat reading the same text to fluency helped children improve decoding, and ultimately children's reading comprehension of the specific text repeatedly read [48]- [54]. One study showed an increase in reading comprehension when students were asked to pay attention to what they were reading [53].…”

Teaching Children to Become Fluent and Automatic Readers

“…According to Logan, each time a reader attends to text, an instance or trace of that text is automatically encoded in memory at the sublexical, lexical, phrase, and text levels. As these instances build up-within a relatively few repetitions (three to five according to many authors; e.g., O'Shea, Sindelar, & O'Shea, 1985, 1987Reutzel, 2003)-they become relatively easier to retrieve (following the power law of learning; Logan, 1997). As a result, a given instance becomes readily available for retrieval at a later point.…”