Leseflüssigkeit im Grundschulalter: Entwicklungsverlauf und Effekte systematischer Leseförderung
Abstract
Die Fähigkeit des flüssigen Lesens stellt im Leseprozess einen Mediator zwischen den hierarchieniedrigen Prozessen der Worterkennung und den hierarchiehohen Prozessen des sinnentnehmenden Lesens auf Satz- und Textebene dar. Im Deutschen findet die explizite Förderung der Leseflüssigkeit jedoch erst seit wenigen Jahren systematische Beachtung, was sich in einem Mangel an evaluierten Trainingsprogrammen niederschlägt. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht diese Studie in einem experimentellen Prä-Post-Design die Entwicklung der Leseflüssigkeit leseschwacher Kinder in Klasse 2 und 4 sowie die Wirksamkeit dreier Lesetrainings auf die Geschwindigkeit der Leseflüssigkeitsentwicklung. Dazu wurden 58 Kinder der zweiten Klasse und 51 Kinder der vierten Klasse, deren Leseleistung unter dem Mittelwert ihrer Schulklasse lag, ausgewählt und randomisiert einer der drei Fördermaßnahmen oder einer Wartekontrollgruppe zugewiesen. Als Kriterium für die Entwicklung der Leseflüssigkeit diente die Anzahl korrekt gelesener Silben und Wörter in einem curriculumsbasierten Speedtest. Die Ergebnisse latenter Wachstumskurvenmodelle zeigen, dass die Leseflüssigkeit im Rahmen der regulären Leseentwicklung über die Klassenstufen 2 bis 4 hinweg zunahm. Zudem konnte die Entwicklung der Leseflüssigkeit durch systematische Fördermaßnahmen positiv beeinflusst werden: Ein Leseflüssigkeitstraining zur expliziten Förderung des flüssigen und betonten Lesens sowie ein Lesestrategietraining zur Verbesserung des sinnentnehmenden Lesens konnten in den Klassen 2 und 4 zur Beschleunigung der Leseflüssigkeit beitragen. Ein Phonics-Training, konzipiert zur Verbesserung der Phonem-Graphem-Assoziationen, zeigte nur in Klasse 4 Effekte auf die Leseflüssigkeit. Die Relevanz dieser Effekte für eine Verbesserung des Leseverständnisses wird diskutiert.
Background: Reading fluency is the ability to read accurately, automatically, and rapidly (Meyer & Felton, 1999). Fluent reading can be considered as the bridge between low-level processes of reading, such as decoding and identifying words, and higher-level processes directed at building a coherent representation of written texts and their contents. Fluent reading indicates that processes at word level are well routinized so that cognitive capacity is available for comprehension processes at sentence and text level (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985). Thus, reading fluency develops in close association with the quality of lexical representations of words and the efficiency of low-level processes (Perfetti & Hart, 2002; Richter et al., 2013).
Individual differences in reading fluency are very stable. In a longitudinal study with 115 German-speaking students, 70 % of the dysfluent readers in Grade 1 were still poor readers in Grade 8 (Landerl & Wimmer, 2008). Different methods for improving reading fluency directly or indirectly have been proposed: At the word level, phonics instructions seems to be an effective means to foster word recognition processes (Ehri et al., 2001). At sentence and text level, explicit fluency trainings such as repeated reading (Samuels, 1979) as well as reading strategy trainings (O'Shea et al., 1985, 1987; Vaughn et al., 2000) may be expected to exert a positive impact on the development of reading fluency.
Despite the fact that becoming a fluent reader is a major goal of reading instruction, trainings of reading fluency are not an explicit part of the primary school curriculum in Germany. Rather, reading fluency is regarded more or less as a by-product of reading instruction (Rosebrock & Nix, 2006).
Aims: Against this background, we developed three reading interventions and tested their effects on the development of fluency of poor readers in Grades 2 and 4: a phonics training to improve letter-sound associations, a fluency training to practice reading speed and accuracy, and a reading strategy training to foster reading comprehension. The development of reading fluency in the training groups was compared to its development in a waiting control group. In addition, we analyzed the connection between the speed in which fluency develops and reading comprehension after training.
Methods: The participants of the longitudinal pre-/post-test experimental study were 58 children in Grade 2 and 51 children in Grade 4 with low reading comprehension scores. The children were selected according to their results in a standardized reading comprehension test (ELFE 1 – 6, Lenhard & Schneider, 2006). From each class five children were chosen whose reading comprehension was below the class average. These children were randomly allocated to one of the three treatment conditions or the control group (randomization at class level).
Reading interventions. All programs were peer-assisted interventions in small groups of 10 children and consisted of 20 sessions each. The phonics training guided children to practice reading aloud single words accurately, fast and with expression. Another focus was the analysis of word structure by syllables. The fluency training used a repeated reading method to read a book: In the beginning, the whole chapter was read in chorus. Subsequently, the chapter was repeated in small teams until the fluency rate increased and the reading mistakes decreased. The reading strategy training conveyed knowledge about three strategies: use prior knowledge, repeat the sentences in small steps, and summarize the chapter after reading. Children practiced these strategies with the same text book as in the fluency treatment. The control group was a waiting control group, which received a combined reading intervention after the post-test.
We expected the phonics and fluency training to improve reading fluency both in Grades 2 and 4 because these trainings explicitly concentrate on the accuracy and efficiency of word level processes. For the reading strategy training, we expected effects on reading fluency only in Grade 4, as poor readers in Grade 2 should not have sufficient cognitive capacity available for implementing resource-dependent strategies at text level.
Reading fluency. The reading fluency measure was a speed-reading test, realized as curriculum-based measurement (CBM, Deno, 1985). The test was conducted in every fifth session. Children were instructed to read a list of syllables and words fast and without mistakes within 40 seconds. Each test consisted of the same items presented in randomized order. The number of syllables and words read correctly was used to compute the fluency rate.
Reading comprehension. In order to analyze the link between reading comprehension and fluent reading, comprehension was assessed with the standardized reading comprehension test ELFE (Lenhard & Schneider, 2006) at pre- and post-test.
Results: Treatment effects on the development of reading fluency. To analyze treatment effects on the development of reading fluency, we conducted latent growth curve models as linear mixed models (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002) with CBM at level-1 and treatment condition as level-2 predictor. We conducted separate models for each grade. Results indicated differences in the trajectories per treatment: In Grade 2 the reading fluency training and the reading strategy training caused a significantly stronger increase of reading fluency compared to the control group. However, the development of reading fluency within the phonics group did not differ from the development of untreated children. In Grade 4 all three reading interventions caused a significantly stronger increase of fluency compared to the control group. The coefficients of the latent growth curve models are summarized in table 3.
Development of reading fluency and reading comprehension. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to analyze whether children's progress in reading fluency significantly predicts their level of reading comprehension after the training, even after controlling for pre-treatment differences in reading fluency and comprehension. The individual deviation from the average slope of reading fluency development was used as predictor for the speed of the development of fluency. In Grades 2 and 4, there was a significant effect of the individual deviation on reading comprehension after treatment: The faster the development of reading fluency, the higher was the post-test reading comprehension. The averaged z-standardized reading comprehension scores per group before and after the treatment are summarized in table 2 (ELFE t1 and ELFE t2).
Discussion: The major goal of this study was to compare the developmental trajectories of reading fluency within three different treatment conditions to the developmental trajectories of poor readers of the same age who did not receive additional reading instruction. The results suggest that the development of reading fluency of poor readers in Grades 2 and 4 can be improved by specific interventions.
In both grades the fluency training led to an increase in the speed of the development of reading fluency. This is in line with findings reviewed by Kuhn and Stahl (2003). Poor readers were able to benefit from the repeated reading method presumably by improving and automating underlying cognitive processes through practice.
In Grade 2 a similar effect was expected for the phonics training but did not occur. One possible explanation for the failure to establish a positive effect of phonics training on the development of reading fluency is that a training dealing with single words and syllables might be less motivating than working with textbooks. Unexpectedly, the reading strategy training led to a steep increase in fluency in Grade 2. This might be explained by the motivating character of the materials used in the training, too, because the training was based on the same text book as the fluency treatment.
In contrast, children in Grade 4 deal with texts every day, which might explain the effectiveness of the phonics training: Poor readers are less proficient in sight word reading and their lexical representations are of low quality (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). A treatment of single words and syllables works especially against their deficits at word level and seems to improve these processes efficiently. The effect of the reading strategy training demonstrates that processes at sentence and text level are necessary for fluent reading, as well.
Finally, the results showed a strong connection between the development of fluent reading and reading comprehension. In both grades children with faster-than-average reading fluency development reached the highest reading comprehension scores.
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