The Role of Reading Fluency in Predicting Reading Proficiency Among French Immersion Elementary Students in Canada

This thesis comprises three studies that investigate the construct of fluency and its relationship with literacy outcomes among elementary students enrolled in Canadian French immersion programs. The first study examined multiple dimensions of fluency and its relationship to reading comprehension among grade 3 students. Fluency assessed across level (word fluency and text fluency) and language (English and French) converged onto a single factor of reading skill. This unitary construct of fluency uniquely predicted English and French reading comprehension beyond a number of language and literacy controls providing evidence for a cross-language relationship between fluency and reading comprehension among emerging English-French bilinguals. The second study investigated an emergent interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary in predicting reading comprehension among students followed from the second to the third grade. In grade 2, word reading fluency and vocabulary contributed independently to reading comprehension, though an interaction between these variables was not observed in either language. By grade 3, an interaction between word reading fluency and vocabulary emerged and uniquely predicted reading comprehension in both English and French. Specifically, vocabulary was positively related to reading comprehension among students with moderate to high levels of fluency, while vocabulary did not contribute to reading comprehension among those who were less fluent. The third study investigated whether the addition of fluency-based measures (letter naming fluency, nonsense word fluency, and word reading fluency) to an existing screening battery would improve the ability to predict students at-risk for future word reading difficulties among kindergarten and first-grade students. Results demonstrated that the inclusion of fluency measures significantly improved upon a baseline battery of phonological processing tasks in the prediction of at-risk status based on English and French word reading measured one year later. Evidence for both within- and cross-language prediction of future reading risk was shown. Grade 1 screening resulted in more accurate prediction compared to screening in kindergarten, suggesting that predictive accuracy increases as children gain additional exposure to reading instruction. Taken together, these results add to the extant research highlighting the prominent role of reading fluency as well as its within- and cross-language relationship with literacy outcomes.Ph.D