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Syntactically cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2006

VALERIE MARCIARILLE LEVASSEUR ,
PAUL MACARUSO ,
LAURA CONWAY PALUMBO  and
DONALD SHANKWEILER
VALERIE MARCIARILLE LEVASSEUR
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and University of Connecticut
PAUL MACARUSO
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and Community College of Rhode Island
LAURA CONWAY PALUMBO
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories
DONALD SHANKWEILER
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and University of Connecticut
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Abstract

Can fluency in oral reading be facilitated by formatting text to preserve major syntactic boundaries? Seven-, 8-, and 9-year-old children read aloud passages under two text format conditions. In the structure-preserving condition, the ends of lines coincided with ends of clauses; in the phrase-disrupting condition, line breaks always interrupted a phrasal unit. Experiment 1 showed that oral reading fluency, as indexed by skill in phrasal reading, was rated higher when children were reading in the structure-preserving condition. In addition, the structure-preserving condition resulted in significantly fewer false starts at the beginning of lines following a return sweep. The results of Experiment 2, in which texts of varying levels of difficulty were read by slightly older readers, confirmed both findings. Measures of fluency were correlated with other language and reading measures; however, no effects of format were obtained on oral reading rate (words correct per minute). Taken as a whole, these findings indicate a benefit of keeping clausal units intact in promoting fluent reading by facilitating the transition from one line to the next.

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Type
Articles
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Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , July 2006 , pp. 423 - 445
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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