The Indicating Factors of Oral Reading Fluency of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Egypt

Abstract

This study examined oral reading fluency (ORF) of bilingual and monolingual students. The author selected a sample of 510 (258 males and 252 females) native Arabic-speaking sixth-graders (62 bilinguals and 448 monolinguals) in Egypt. The purposes were; (a) to examine oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, prosody, and oral reading comprehension as indicating factors in ORF, and b) to investigate the impact of bilingual education on students' ORF in Arabic. Participants individually completed the author-developed Oral Reading Fluency Measure. Results indicated a very good fit between the proposed model and the observed data i.e., oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, prosody, and oral reading comprehension are significant indicators of ORF. Interestingly, results revealed that the bilingual students performed better than their monolingual counterparts on oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, and prosody but not on oral reading comprehension. The discussion concludes that (a) in addition to oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, and prosody, oral reading comprehension is a significant indicating factor of ORF, (b) learning a second language, English, has a positive effect on ORF in the first language, Arabic, and (c) the nature of Arabic orthography is an indispensible factor when examining ORF in science of reading.

Toward developing a standardized Arabic continuous text reading chart

“…The only comparable data is that of Hussien, 53 which showed a median oral reading rate of 90 WPM in 6th grade children. The obvious reason for the higher reading rate in Husseins's study is the higher grade levels of the children (6th versus 3rd grade readers).…”

Reading Arabic Shallow and Deep Genres: Indispensible Variables to Science of Reading

“…3, No. 1;2014 Answering the last key question of the current study "What is the effect of the genre (informational and poetic) on oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy and oral reading comprehension of the fifth and tenth grade students?" A Paired-Samples T Test was used as explained in Table 2.…”

“…3, No. 1;2014 Latin orthographies, usually English, which makes the science of reading at most the science of reading English (Perfetti & Cao, 2013, p. 5). As consequences, reading research has limited relevance and implications for a universal science of reading (Share, 2008, p. 584).…”

“…The point here is that how many words children can read aloud per minute? This requires considering many variables, chief among them, the uniqueness of orthography (Abu-Hajaj, 2006;Hussien, 2014), and genre being read, as explained above. Arabic orthography, for example, is transparent, if presented vowelized, and is a homographic, if introduced unvowelized.…”

Omani Young Children’s Language Proficiencies: The Outcomes of a Bilingual Education Program

“…Unfortunately, there is no adequate research on this topic. Noting the limitation in the literature review for this study, the studies of Hussien (2014aHussien ( , 2014b should be mentioned. Hussien examined the language performance of bilingual children in both Arabic and English and concluded that they performed better than their monolingual counterparts (2014a) and that learning English has a positive effect on their Arabic skills (2014b).…”