An exception is a recent study showing that children’s listening comprehension was uniquely related to text reading fluency after accounting for list reading fluency for first graders. However, this unique relation appears to depend on children’s developmental level of word reading proficiency such that listening comprehension was uniquely related to text reading fluency only for skilled word readers but not for average word readers in first grade (Kim et al., 2011). Thus, a certain level of word reading proficiency might be needed for listening comprehension to play a role in text reading fluency. These results lend support to the verbal efficiency theory (Perfetti, 1985, Perfetti, 1992), which posits that children’s word reading proficiency influences the consolidation of fluency component skills. For readers with slow and nonautomatic word reading, word reading will constrain meaning construction processes in text reading fluency and reading comprehension. For children with skilled word reading, cognitive resources are available for meaning construction (i.e., comprehension), thereby allowing listening comprehension to be related to text reading fluency (Kim et al., 2011).

text reading fluency (oral reading fluency and silent reading fluency)