ABSTRACT
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the development and progress of reading fluency of secondary elementary school pupils in schooling grades that were selected for the study programme.
Methods
232 elementary school pupils with ages ranging from 11 to 15 years of age, from both public and private schools were recorded reading a text aloud. None of the students selected had learning difficulties or any other forms of linguistic, sensory or cognitive problems. The pupils were asked to complete a questionnaire that was based on the text that they had previously read. The final grades in Portuguese were provided by each educational institution, in order to establish an indicator of academic performance.
Results
In general there was an increase in reading accuracy, except for the seventh and eight year pupils attending the private school that only managed the same average of word accuracy per minute, and the seventh year of the public school pupils who´s result was poorer than that of the sixth year. The results of the questionnaire that was given to the pupils showed a good level of comprehension of the textual content, and the measurements of fluency levels the pupils achieved showed that they understood the meaning of the text. The correlations between reading fluency and academic performance of both schools are weak to moderate.
Conclusion
The results of this study show that reading fluency and accuracy rates increased gradually along with the progress in secondary elementary schooling, giving an estimation of the expected values for each school year studied, that participated by reading an easy level text.
Keywords:
Reading; Comprehension; Fluency; Students; Learning