Repeated reading and Chinese oral-reading fluency: Is prosodic sensitivity an indispensable link?

Abstract

Background: This quasi-experimental study tested whether prosodic sensitivity serves as a mediator through which an 8-week repeated reading intervention improves Chinese oral reading fluency. Methods: Seventy-nine typically developing Chinese Grades 4–6 students, including 39 in the experimental group and 40 in the control group, were recruited from north Taiwan and completed pretests and posttests of prosodic sensitivity, Chinese character reading and oral reading fluency before and after the intervention. Results: Our results of 2 (group) × 2 (time) two-way ANCOVAs indicated that significant interactions of prosodic sensitivity, Chinese character reading and oral reading fluency, and the simple main effects showed that repeated reading interventions could significantly improve all three reading skills. Additionally, parallel and sequential mediation models, estimated with 5000 bootstraps, examined two possible causal chains of the experimental group: decoding-first (time → Chinese character reading difference → prosodic sensitivity difference → oral reading fluency difference) and prosody-first (time → prosodic sensitivity difference → Chinese character reading difference → oral reading fluency difference). Because the pretest–posttest difference of the control group is not significant for any of the three reading skills, such mediation analyses were applied to the experimental group only. Results of this section showed that the prosody-first chain produced a coherent, positive indirect effect, whereas the decoding-first chain was insignificant. Total variance explained in oral reading fluency gains was comparable across models, but path coherence favored the prosody-first ordering. Conclusions: These findings suggest that repeated reading may accelerate Chinese oral reading fluency partly by first strengthening prosodic sensitivity, which then facilitates more accurate and efficient character decoding.