Reading Fluency of Elementary Students With and Without Low Reading Performance

Abstract

This study aimed to compare reading fluency skills (reading accuracies, reading error frequencies and characteristics of reading prosody) of third grade elementary Turkish-speaking students with and without low reading performances. In the study, causal descriptive comparative research method was used. Twenty six students with low reading performance and 26 students without low reading performance who attended third grade classes of elementary schools in the city of Ankara participated in this study. In constitution of the groups, students’ reading rate performances were taken into account. The results of the study showed that reading
accuracies of students with low reading performance were less than those of students without low reading performance. In addition, the students with low reading performance made more mispronunciation, repetition of a word part, self correction, letter-syllable omission, letter-syllable insertion, letter substitution, reversal of a word part, letter reversal, and word final substitution errors. Although students with low reading performance made more reading errors than their peers, their error model was very similar to that of their peers. Taking into account the reading accuracies of the groups, with the exception of one (instructional), all the students without low reading performance had independent reading level; 9 students with low reading performance had instructional level and 17 of them failed in frustration level. The students with low reading performance showed lower performance in all dimensions of reading prosody than the students without low reading performance.