Do Text Genres Affect Reading Rate? A study on Spanish-Speaking Primary School Children

An adequate development of reading rate is necessary to gain reading fluency and good comprehension. The aim of this study was to investigate how reading rate develops across different grades and text genres —narrative and expository— throughout primary school. The results show that as the readers advance in terms of school grade, they gain a greater articulatory and elocutionary reading rate. However, students at different grades could vary the way they use their reading rate across text genres, and the direction of this variation could also differ according to the metrics of velocity measurement. Our study suggests that phones, being less sensitive to text characteristics than words and syllables, are the best units for studying the effect of text genres on reading rate. In this sense, early primary students maintained a constant reading rate across text genres, meanwhile advanced readers accelerated when reading the expository text in comparison with the narrative text. We conclude that each genre may demand the students to use their time in a particular way in order to support the cognitive processing of the text and facilitate the reconstruction of meaning. However, this genre specific use of time in reading appears only in the advanced readers.