Bidirectional Relations between Text Reading Prosody and Reading Comprehension in the Upper Primary School Grades: A...

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Literacy Research

Background:

• Reading comprehension and text reading prosody are crucial for academic success.
• Understanding the directionality of their relationship is key to effective reading instruction.
• Previous research has yielded mixed findings on this relationship.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension.
• To compare unidirectional (prosody to comprehension, comprehension to prosody) and bidirectional models.
• To examine this relationship in upper primary school grades.

Main Methods:

• Longitudinal study of 99 Dutch children from fourth to sixth grade.
• Structural equation modeling to test theoretical models.
• Controlled for autoregressive effects and included decoding efficiency.

Main Results:

• The bidirectional model provided the best fit for the data.
• In fifth grade, text reading prosody was related to prior decoding and reading comprehension.
• In sixth grade, reading comprehension was related to prior text reading prosody.

Conclusions:

• The relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension is reciprocal.
• This reciprocal relationship is dependent on the grade level.
• Findings have implications for targeted reading interventions.