The Relations between Reading Comprehension and Reading Fluency: Their Reciprocal Roles as an Indicator and Predictor

In the current research, we aimed to explore the relations between reading comprehension and reading fluency and their connections with each other as an indicator and a predictor. For this overall aim, a total of 100 students from the seventh-grade level were enrolled. This research took place in fall semester, 2015, in Turkey’s Denizli province. The participants from all grade levels were willing and available to take part in the present study. Informed consent letters were obtained from all of the participants and their parents or guardians. The participants were relatively homogenous and of middle socioeconomic (SES) status. They ranged in age from 13 through 15 years. For the measures of fluency, components were taken from students’ oral reading of the same texts including narrative and expository according to grade levels. After then, the students’ reading comprehension levels were assessed. Every comprehension test for the grade levels included a narrative text and an expository text, and 12 questions were prepared for every text, six of which were literal and another five of which were inferential. The path analyses were used to identify the relations between reading fluency and reading comprehension. According to the results of the research, some recommendations were given.