How Will Repeated Oral Reading Practice Impact Reading Fluency - Case Study Example

? How Will Repeated Oral Reading Practice Impact Reading Fluency? Several find oral reading fluency and comprehension skills as a monumental challenge, especially those in their early stages of English language development. To these students, prosody or phrasing and facile text recognition present a real challenge. To establish a better approach to mitigate these challenges, educators have embraced the well-known repeated instruction approach. This paper investigates how repeated reading can influence a student’s fluency in English. Key words: Repeated Reading Contents The Context 4 Review of Literature 4 The Project 6 Methodology 6 Participants 6 Materials 6 Procedure 7 Word List 8 Cued Text 8 Standard Text 9 Discussion of Findings 9 Implications 11 References 13 Action Research Proposal The Context I teach at an elementary school, J.B. Nachman, in Alexandria, Louisiana. The school starts at Pre-K and goes through to fifth grade. There are approximately 700 students in the school. Nachman is the solitary elementary school in the district that is not considered a Title One school. I teach third grade, and we are not currently departmentalized. There are 23 students in my class: eight African American students, thirteen white students and one Asian student. I have one child with an IEP, and he is with a resource teacher for a majority of the day. There are no other adults in my classroom. I have chosen a small group of students (eight children) for my project based on their most recent DIBELS scores. The children, under my watch, have scored well below benchmark and are likely to need intensive support with regard to oral reading fluency. These are children who enjoy reading and are not intimidated to read aloud, as much as they struggle with word recognition and fluency. Review of Literature Clearly, reading serves many purposes in our daily lives. We use it in our work and play. We use it to help us learn more about ourselves and about the world around us in addition to sharing information with others (Martin-Chang & Levy, 2005). The National Reading Panel Report (2000) contained conclusive research that indicated that reading fluency was an essential element of the entire reading process, and that it was crucial that it is taught to developing readers. “Just as children and adults love to watch favorite movies over and over, readers of all ages have books, or sections of books, that they enjoy reading and re-reading, time and time again” (Dowhower, 1994, p. 354). Since the 1970s, researchers and scholars have collected data that supported the concept that multiple readings of connected text enhanced the reading skills of a regular student. Reading stories to young students, besides their personal rereading, at least three times proved to enrich reading development. This procedure of repeated readings was simple, yet extraordinarily powerful (Dowhower, 1994). Using the common round robin approach in the classroom, where students take turns reading a small portion of the story, substantially limited amount of practice each student received because no child was allowed to read for very long. In order for students to establish significant progress in reading, beyond the initial stages, they needed to be given sufficient opportunities to practice reading in a variety of text styles (Pikulski & Chard, 2003). Employing repeated reading on a regular basis in a variety of formats could impact word recognition, reading fluency and comprehension (Rasinski, 2003). There is much evidence to support claims that repeating reading instruction influenced fluency in a diverse array of students. The ultimate goal of repeated reading instruction was to then enable students to generalize fluency to new passages that were being read for the first time (Nanda & Frederick, 2007). According to Pikulski and Chard (2003), repeated oral reading is the most frequently documented approach to improving fluency, with improved outcomes for young students up through college age students. The Project How will the Repeated Oral Reading Practice Impact Reading Fluency? My students will participate in several different reading strategies to assess reading fluency. They will participate in cooperative reading, echo reading, paired reading and repeated reading. The pre-assessment of my students was done on September 10, 2011 with the DIBELS test being administered to them. The intervention process began on September, 24, 2012 and was wound up on November 16, 2012. Interventions were implemented in small groups during allotted reading time. The post-assessment was completed before November 23, 2012. Methodology Participants The sample participants to this research consisted of 8 students out of the 23 students from my class. The students are third graders and were tested from September 2011 to November 2012. Materials All tests that can evaluate language fluency and reading skills were availed in order to improve the students’ reading profile. These included specifically oral-English aspects such as reading fluency, word identification, word attack, picture vocabulary, and word comprehension. In addition to this, I administered Rapid Serial Naming (RSN), i.e. object naming and letter naming. I also administered a word span task to the students so as to test their reading memory capacity. I picked two fictional passages to affect the impacts of repeated reading in my students. The passages were picked from the texts that the students had earlier rated as readable during the beginning of their third grade. The data was collected using the DORF (DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency). The scores were based on how fluent students, which included word fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. The first quarter of the two passages was used at the pre-test stage, i.e. while training them, while the rest of the passage was used as a post-test. Procedure Data will be collected using the DORF (DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency) portion of the DIBLES test. Students will be given a passage to read and will be assessed as to how many words they read in a minute, as well as the accuracy with which they did so. Research will be collected using the number of words read correctly per minute from the DIBELS benchmark measure. This information will be examined in an effort to determine growth for individual students. Just as explained above, I picked two passages from a number of passages that the students had ranked as readable at the beginning of their grade three. Note that I have been teaching these students from grade two and thus I understand their respective weaknesses as well as their strengths. The passages I picked are made up of at most 250 words. I used the first quarter of the passage as my pre-assessment. I let each student read loudly in front of the class without making any corrections. I instructed the rest of the students to remain quiet and not to make any correction. While the students did this, I noted down the errors made by each one of them. After the whole class had gone through the passage, I gave my assessment to each of them and made general corrections in the class. I noted that there were some students who needed individual guidance and thus recalled them after class to make the required corrections. The pre-assessment results enabled me to understand general weaknesses and thus where to emphasize on during the training. Therefore, I based on this information to schedule the training. Each student took part in three repeated reading (RR) training conditions, inter alia, cued text, standard text, and word list. These training conditions are briefly described below. I guided the children to reach each of the selected tests thrice each day in the three different conditions. To encourage a closer contact with the students, I divided them into groups of four each basing on how fluent the students were during the pre-assessment. In these groups, I instructed them to first go through the text silently and thereafter read it loudly for the other group members to hear. I allowed the students to correct themselves, and I only came in for complex words or in cases where they failed to come to a consensus. After I was satisfied that each group had attained a recommendable level of word fluency, I brought them together as a class. Word List Under this condition, I selected 20 words from the passages to make a word list. In my selection of the words, I targeted both low and high frequency words and some other words that were a common challenge to the students during the pre-assessment. I gave each student the word list printed in a paper. I then pronounced each of the words clearly until all the students were satisfied. Afterwards, I instructed each of the students to read through the words loudly and made corrections instantly. Cued Text Under this condition, I gave the students the same passage they used during the pre-assessment, but with clauses and phrases given in cued format. The clausal structure at line breaks was not changed, and I inserted extra spaces between phrases to cue them. I then told them to note how the words were grouped together. This implied that they were gathered to give some meaning. To give a memorable emphasis on how the words are supposed to be read, I played an audio player for the cued text. Standard Text Under this condition, I presented the same passage read in the pre-assessment, but in a standard format. I gave similar instructions to those in the cued text condition except that I did not give any relationship between the phrases and visual cues. I only played the audiotape version of the passage to the students and thereafter asked the students to follow the procedure described. Immediately after the training, I conducted a post-training test. I picked the same passage, but altered it a bit. I introduced different but related words and phrases. This helped me to test how well the students can relate what they learnt during the training with other new terms. However, I ensured that the introduced words were few and not complex at all. I then instructed each student to go through the passages noting that their fluency in the reading will be part of their end of grade assessment. This was not to serve as a threat, but to ensure that the students were as cautious as possible. After all of them had read the test, I ranked them in a scale from 5 to 50. For the purpose of analyzing the collected data, I organized the collected information differently. First was language descriptive statistics where I assessed the reading related skills including word identification, reading fluency, passage comprehension, and word attack. Secondly, I used the word list, phrase-cued text, and standard text to assess the effects of the training conditions. Lastly, I evaluated individual differences during the post-assessment in response to the completed training. Discussion of Findings Generally, I found out that routine repeated reading has a lot of influence as far as fluency in reading is concerned. As such, this approach is particularly useful for students taking English as a second language. In my pre-assessment, I noted that more than half of the class was poor in comprehending complex English words. In their reading, they had unnecessary pauses in the sense that they placed commas inappropriately. Their reading tone did not change in response to the sentence punctuation. My training, therefore, endeavored to change these poor reading skills. During the training, I realized that spoken discourse rather than printed text conveys more phrasing, prosody, and other oral fluency skills. This explains why I had to play an audio tape to the students before giving them chance to read the audio played text. Moreover, I realized that handling students individually helps a lot in mitigating individual challenges. Note that I had a large number of students and thus handling the individually during the training could be cumbersome. I, therefore, divided them into small groups made up of students with common challenges. The three training conditions I used were extremely handy during the training. Young readers find it particularly challenging to fully comprehend a whole sentence. In addition to this, they were challenged more by long sentences that had several punctuation marks. Breaking the sentences into individual words and phrases promoted their grasp of the oral skills needed. LeVasseur et al. (2004) explain that in order to attain high level of fluency, young readers should understand individual groups of phrases that have been joined to make a complete sentence. My post training assessment proved that indeed repeated training has a lot of positive effects to reading fluency of students. After the assessment, all the students were capable of reading through the text without posing unnecessarily. Besides this, their word pronunciation had improved a lot. There were slight differences in their pronunciation majorly due to the influence of their first language. The data below shows how students performed in the pre-assessment and in the post-assessment. The scores ranged from 5 to 50 and fluency on reading was rated out of 5. Measure Standard Cued List Pre-Assessment Post -Assessment Pre-Assessment Post-Assessment Pre-Assessment Post -Assessment Comprehension 25 38 20 38 19 32 Word Error 30 12 22 06 32 05 False start 30 09 28 08 32 02 Other influences 20 05 15 01 20 10 Fluency Rating 2.1 4.2 2.2 4.1 2.0 4.0 Table1: The effects of the tree repeated reading conditions to fluency in reading. From the data above, I can confidently conclude that this research has answered the research question. Although it has not fully affected the expectation, it has positively changed students’ reading fluency to an encouraging level. Implications From this study, I have learnt that repeated reading will improve the rate at which my students attain fluency. This implies that I will change my teaching approach from the one I have been using into repeated reading. Besides this, I will use the results of my study to convince my fellow teachers to give this approach a try. Note that this teaching approach is exceptionally flexible and thus any teacher can cause a different approach to attain the expected results. At the end of the day, students will find it remarkably easy to grasp oral skill thus their love for English will improve. While conducting my study, I realized that repeated reading can take two approaches (Dowhower, 1994). Students can be left to practice reading on their own or be guided by the teacher. Out of the two approaches, guided reading gives better results since there are some words or phrases which are too complex for the students. In the event that I am honored with an opportunity to carry out this research again, I will try to find other possible modifications that can be done to repeated reading so as to suit individual students. Ultimately, we differ mentally and thus our understanding also differs. References Dowhower, S. (1994). Repeated Reading Revisited: Research Into Practice. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 10(4), 343–358. LeVasseur, V. M., Macaruso, P., Palumbo, L. C., & Shankweiler, D. (2006). Syntactically-cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(3), 423-445. Martin-Chang, S. L., & Levy, B. A. (2005). Fluency transfer: Differential gains in reading speed and accuracy following isolated word and context training. Reading and Writing. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18(1), 343-376. Nanda, A., & Fredrick, L. (2007). The Effects of Combining Repeated Reading with “Reading Mastery” on First Graders’ Oral Reading Fluency. Journal of Direct Instruction, 7(1), 17-27. National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching Children To Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment Of The Scientific Research On Reading And Its Implications For Reading Instruction. Pikulski, J. & Chard, D. (2003). Current Research in Reading/ Language Arts. Retrieved from www.eduplace.com/state/author/pik_chard_fluency.pdf. Rasinski, T. (2003). The Fluent Reader: Oral Reading Strategies for Building Word Recognition, Fluency and Comprehension. New York: Scholastic, Inc. Read More