Reading Fluency of Elementary Students in Korea: Reading Developmental Patterns and Error Patterns

Kim, Ae Hwa; Park, Sung Hee; Kim, Ju Hyun

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2010;15(1): 43-55.

Ae Hwa Kim^` , Sung Hee Park^` , and Ju Hyun Kim^`

김애화(Ae Hwa Kim)|박성희(Sung Hee Park)|김주현(Ju Hyun Kim)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
Recently, the importance of reading fluency has been emphasized.However, a limited number of studies on reading fluency are available in Korea. Thus, this study was conducted with a total of 76 elementary students in grades 1, 3, and 5, to compare the developmental patterns of reading fluency across grades and to examine the types of errors and their frequencies.
Methods
For the purpose of this study, reading passages at each grade level were developed. Developmental patterns of reading fluency across grades and the types of errors were analyzed.
Results
The major results were summarized as follows: first, reading fluency results showed significant differences according to grade level. Second, the analysis results of the errors from the word-level perspective showed that replacement errors appeared most frequently, followed by self-correction errors, repetition errors, deletion errors, and addition errors. Moreover, students tended to replace words with those with a different meaning rather than changing them into non-existent words. Third, the analysis results of text-level errors showed that the occurrence of errors that retained the meaning of the sentence was higher than that of nonsensical errors.
Discussion & Conclusion
Based on the results from the present study, it can be concluded that reading fluency develops quantatively and qualitatively over the elementary school years.