The relationship between different measures of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension in second-grade students who evidence different oral reading fluency difficulties.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine whether different measures of oral reading fluency relate differentially to reading comprehension performance in two samples of second-grade students: (a) students who evidenced difficulties with nonsense-word oral reading fluency, real-word oral reading fluency, and oral reading fluency of connected text (ORFD), and (b) students who evidenced difficulties only with oral reading fluency of connected text (CTD). METHOD Participants (ORFD, n = 146 and CTD, n = 949) were second-grade students who were recruited for participation in different reading intervention studies. Data analyzed were from measures of nonsense-word oral reading fluency, real-word oral reading fluency, oral reading fluency of connected text, and reading comprehension that were collected at the pre-intervention time point. RESULTS Correlational and path analyses indicated that real-word oral reading fluency was the strongest predictor of reading comprehension performance in both samples and across average and poor reading comprehension abilities. CONCLUSION Results of this study indicate that real-word oral reading fluency was the strongest predictor of reading comprehension and suggest that real-word oral reading fluency may be an efficient method for identifying potential reading comprehension difficulties.