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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 9, pp 1987–2007 | Cite as

Reading development in European Portuguese: relationships between oral reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension

  • Sandra Fernandes
  • Luís Querido
  • Arlette Verhaeghe
  • Catarina Marques
  • Luísa Araújo
Article
First Online:

Abstract

This study investigated direct and indirect effects between oral reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension across reading development in European Portuguese. Participants were 329 children attending basic education, from grade 1 to grade 6. The results of path analyses showed that text reading fluency is much more dependent on the foundational skills of word recognition than reading comprehension, and the later, in turn, depends crucially on the specific constituent skill of text reading fluency. Text reading fluency has a significant influence on vocabulary from the beginning, but vocabulary contributed to reading comprehension only in more advanced grades. These results, obtained with an orthography of intermediate depth, are in line with the Simple View of Reading (SVR). However, they also highlight the importance of textual cues—besides the pivotal role of decoding—from the beginning of learning to read, which must be taken into account in the SVR.

Keywords

Decoding Oral reading fluency Vocabulary Reading comprehension Path analysis 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by FCT—Foundation of Science and Technology under the Ph.D. research grant SFRH/BD/46432/2008. Data collection was supported and carried out under the project “Developmental benchmarks of reading and writing, in European Portuguese, from first to sixth grade” (2008–2010), under the auspices of the National Reading Plan. We thank the students, teachers, administrators, school personnel of the two intervenient schools, and the examiners who collected data in the field. We also thank the writer Isabel Alçada for her contribution in the writing of some texts included in the reading comprehension test. We would also like to thank Professor José Morais for his constructive comments on a previous version of the manuscript. Lastly, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions that greatly contributed to improve the paper.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sandra Fernandes
    • 1
  • Luís Querido
    • 1
  • Arlette Verhaeghe
    • 1
  • Catarina Marques
    • 2
  • Luísa Araújo
    • 3
  1. 1.Faculdade de PsicologiaUniversidade de LisboaLisbonPortugal
  2. 2.ISCTE-Instituto Universitario de LisboaLisbonPortugal
  3. 3.Instituto Superior de Educação e CiênciasLisbonPortugal

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