This study intended to find out the developmental characteristics of reading fluency ability and reading comprehension ability according to reading methods (oral reading and silent reading) with the children elementary school children as the target...
This study intended to find out the developmental characteristics of reading fluency ability and reading comprehension ability according to reading methods (oral reading and silent reading) with the children elementary school children as the targets.
Study subjects were total of 48 children including 17 1st grade students, 16 3rd grade students, and 15 5th grade students in elementary schools within Gyeonggi region. Total of 4 texts were selected as study tools including 2 narrative texts and 2 expository texts from ‘Korean Language Reading Book 3, Story and Descriptive Disclosure' (Kyeong Hee, Jeong. et. al, 2017). Reading methods were divided to silent reading and oral reading to study reading fluency and children were asked to answer to reading comprehension assessment questions. Questions types were divided to literal comprehension and inferential comprehension and were composed of total of 24 questions including 4 literal comprehension questions and 2 inferential comprehension questions for each test. The study results are as follows.
First, as the grade gets higher, reading fluency capability increased, and had significant difference between 1st grade and 5th grade groups and 3rd grade and 5th grade groups. According to reading methods, it showed higher capability in silent reading than oral reading. In oral reading, there was significant difference between 1st grade and 5th grade groups and 3rd grade and 5th grade groups, and in silent reading, there was significant difference between 1st grade and 5th grade groups. But no interaction effect was shown between groups and reading methods.
Second, as the grade gets higher, reading comprehension capability increased, and there was significant difference between 1st grade and 3rd grade groups and 1st grade and 5th grade groups. According to reading methods, it showed higher capability in oral reading than silent reading. In oral reading and silent reading, there was significant difference between 1st grade and 3rd grade groups and 1st grade and 5th grade groups, but no interaction effect was shown between groups and reading methods.
As a result of this study, reading fluency and reading comprehension capability was found to develop as grade increases, and reading comprehension capability was found to be higher in oral reading than silent reading. Such result implies that consideration for oral reading is necessary during the teaching of reading comprehension not just in low grade but also in high grade in elementary schools.