The present longitudinal study, conducted for eight and a half months, investigated the relationship between reading comprehension accuracy and fluency, and the relationship between reading comprehension and the components . A total of 119 technical college students in Japan were administered six types of tests : reading accuracy, reading fluency, vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, grammar knowledge, and listening comprehension. The results showed 1) the correlation between reading comprehension accuracy and fluency was moderate and that reading accuracy at the first stage predicted reading fluency at the second stage; 2) listening comprehension (r = .568 and .577 at the first and second stages , respectively), vocabulary breadth (.473, .546), grammar knowledge (.429, .434), and vocabulary depth (.282, .197) showed statistically significant correlations with reading accuracy; 3) at the first stage, grammar knowledge showed the highest correlation with reading fluency, but at the second stage, vocabulary breadth demonstrated the highest correlation with reading fluency; 4) vocabulary breadth at the first stage was a predictor of reading accuracy and fluency at the second stage, while grammar knowledge at the first stage predicted reading accuracy at the second stage, and vocabulary depth at the first stage predicted neither reading accuracy nor fluency at the second stage.
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