The role of word recognition, oral reading fluency and listening comprehension in the simple view of reading: a study in an intermediate depth orthography

Cross‐Lagged Relations Among Linguistic Skills in European Portuguese: A Longitudinal Study

“…When comparing the decoding measures, speed was found to be a more powerful predictor of reading comprehension than accuracy in the first two years of schooling, but after that, the magnitude of the correlations between reading comprehension and decoding speed and accuracy was similar. Subsequent studies in intermediate‐depth orthographies, such as Dutch (Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, ) and European Portuguese (Cadime et al., ), and transparent orthographies such as Italian (Tobia & Bonifacci, ) reached similar conclusions regarding the determinant role of listening comprehension on reading comprehension across elementary school.…”

“…Although the size of these relations can be considered small (Cohen, ), it is very similar to the size of the effects obtained in studies in other intermediate‐depth orthographies that used cross‐lagged models to test the relation between these skills (Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, , ). A previous study in European Portuguese (Cadime et al., ) suggested a strong effect of listening comprehension on reading comprehension in grades 2 and 4; however, the cross‐lagged relations between the variables were not tested, and the autoregressive effects were not controlled. Therefore, when all of these effects are controlled in the analysis, the size of the relations between the variables seems to decrease.…”

“…In sum, in studies in orthographies more transparent than English, listening comprehension has been identified as a strong predictor of reading comprehension, not only in the older grades but also in early grade levels (Joshi, ), and reading speed, whether measured with word‐reading fluency measures (Florit & Cain, ) or oral reading fluency measures (Cadime et al., ), generally seems to be a stronger predictor of reading comprehension than accuracy.…”

“…Regarding our second research question, we hypothesized that reciprocal relations also would be observed between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, given that the existence of reciprocal relations was suggested in several studies in transparent, opaque, and intermediate‐depth orthographies (Berninger et al, ; Jenkins et al, ; Kim, ; Little et al, ). Additionally, we expected that a model including oral reading fluency instead of word reading would present a better fit than the previous model because previous studies indicated that speed is more determinant for reading comprehension than accuracy in transparent and intermediate‐depth orthographies (Cadime et al, ; Florit & Cain, ). To explore our second research question, we fitted a second model to test the cross lagged‐relations among reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and oral reading fluency, instead of word reading.…”

“…The contribution of word‐reading skills, oral reading fluency, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension performance has been well established (Berninger, Abbott, Vermeulen, & Fulton, ; Cadime et al., ; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, ; Goff, Pratt, & Ong, ; Kim, ; Kim, Wagner, & Foster, ; Tilstra, McMaster, van den Broek, Kendeou, & Rapp, ), but the existence of bidirectional relations among those skills has been studied less frequently (Berninger & Abbott, ; Berninger et al., ; Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, ; Kim, ; Little et al., ; Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, , ). For research and intervention purposes, it is of the utmost importance to study the directionality of these relations and whether they change throughout elementary school grades.…”