The effects of oral repeated reading with and without corrective feedback on middle school struggling readers

This study examines the effects of oral repeated reading, with and without corrective feedback, on the fluency and comprehension skills of 60 struggling readers in 7th Grade. Comparisons were made by group on narrative and expository reading ability and by comprehension question type. Students were randomly assigned to one of two reading groups (oral repeated reading with corrective feedback and oral repeated reading without corrective feedback). Participants in each group were required to repeatedly read a narrative and an expository passage. Statistical analyses (namely, repeated measures ANOVA and ANCOVA) were used to determine the overall effects on fluency and comprehension and differential effects demonstrated by groups on text type and comprehension question type. Results indicated that both forms of intervention improved fluency and comprehension. Limitations and implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Reading Rescue: A follow-up on effectiveness of an intervention for struggling readers

The authors examined whether Reading Rescue continues to be an effective literacy intervention and factors that impact its effectiveness. Data were collected on 143 first-grade students, tutored by 104 tutors at 38 schools. There was significant growth on all foundational skills (ps?ps?d?=?1.62 sight words, d?=?1.68 oral reading/comprehension). Student-level factors of Individualized Education Program status, program completion, number of session, and invented spelling; tutor-level factors of sessions delivered and years of experience; school level factors of school size and percentage of language minority students all predicted grade-level passage or word reading (all ps?2007 Ehri, L. C., Dreyer, L. G., Flugman, B., &; Gross, A. (2007). Reading rescue: An effective tutoring intervention model for language-minority students who are struggling readers in first grade. American Educational Research Journal, 44(2), 414–448.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) study. Efforts should focus on ensuring program completion and increasing program exposure in neediest schools.     

The effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young ESL readers

A quasi-experimental research design was used to investigate the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young English as a second language (ESL) readers in a rural school. The pretest and posttest, adapted from the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) for Preschool Students and Grades 1 to 3 tests, assessed children’s early reading skills. A semi-structured interview was used to gather information. The findings indicated that the performance of students in the experimental group in decoding was significantly higher in the posttest, where t(39) = 31.441, p < .00005. Likewise, in comprehension, the experimental group achieved significantly higher scores in the posttest, where t(39) = 15.322, p < .00005. There was a significant difference in the achievement between the two groups, where t(78) = 31.010, p < .00005. This indicates that synthetic phonics could be effective in developing early reading skills for struggling readers.     

The impact of an intervention on children's reading and spelling ability in low-income schools in India

The aim of this study using a quasi-experimental design was to investigate whether utilising synthetic phonics in schools catering for low-income families in India would increase reading and spelling attainment in English. Over 500 children in 20 schools took part in the 6-month programme. Just over half of the children experienced lessons organised around the synthetic phonics materials, whilst the other children continued with their normal English lessons. The findings show that there were statistically significant differences between the intervention and control groups in the improvements of the children in their test scores in reading and spelling.     

Reading in Arabic orthography: The effect of vowels and context on reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers

This study investigated the effect of Arabic vowels and Arabic context on reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers reading narrative stories and newspaper articles. Central to this study is the belief that reading theory today should consider additional variables, especially when explaining the reading process in Arabic orthography among poor and skilled readers. This orthography has not been studied: reading theory today is the sum of conclusions from studies conducted in Latin orthography. The subjects were 109 tenth-grade native Arabic speakers, 39 of them poor readers and 70 skilled readers. Subjects had to read Arabic narrative stories and newspaper articles. There were four reading conditions for each text type: vowelized text, unvowelized text, vowelized word naming, and unvowelized word naming. The results showed that vowels and contexts were important variables to facilitate word recognition in poor and skilled readers in Arabic orthography. A new Arabic reading model for skilled readers is suggested.     

Rapid recovery in sub‐optimal readers in Wales through a self‐paced computer‐based reading programme

Basic literacy skills underlie much future adult functioning, and are targeted in children through a variety of means. Children with identified special needs in reading were exposed to a self‐paced computer‐based reading programme that focused on improving phonetic ability. Exposure was limited to three, 40‐minute sessions a week, for 10 weeks. The children were assessed in terms of their reading, spelling and mathematics abilities before the programme commenced, and immediately after the programme terminated. The programme improved reading and spelling by about eight months, but had no impact on mathematics. The results suggest that brief exposure to a self‐paced phonetic computer‐based teaching programme had some benefits for the sample.     

‘Just reading’: the impact of a faster pace of reading narratives on the comprehension of poorer adolescent readers in English classrooms

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read‐through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole challenging novels at a faster pace than usual in 12 weeks with their average and poorer readers ages 12–13. Ten teachers received additional training in teaching comprehension. Students in both groups made 8.5 months' mean progress on standardised tests of reading comprehension, but the poorer readers made a surprising 16 months progress but with no difference made by the training programme. Simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a fast pace in each lesson repositioned ‘poorer readers’ as ‘good’ readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period. However, the qualitative data showed that teachers with the additional training provided a more coherent faster read and better supported poorer readers by explicitly teaching inference, diagnosed students' ‘sticking places’ mid‐text and created socially cohesive guided reading groups that further supported weaker readers and also stretched the average/good readers.     

Levelling the reading gap: a socio‐spatial study of school libraries and reading in Singapore

This article takes a comparative socio‐spatial approach at the intersection of social class and reading politics to provide a fresh way of examining school reading policies and practices, unearthing previously hidden spaces of inequity for reading intervention. The juxtaposition of two nested case studies in Singapore, one of an elite all‐boys' school and another of a co‐educational government school with students in different academic tracks, revealed inequitable practices, specifically in the designs and uses of school library spaces between schools serving different social classes. The study argues that attempts to design reading interventions should move away from the view of student‐as‐problem to structure‐as‐problem in order to discover new perspectives for reading intervention. Additionally, this study demonstrates how foregrounding social class in educational research is necessary for effective design of educational strategies that aim to transform education and society by narrowing the gap between students from different social classes.     

The use of phonological, orthographic, and contextual information during reading: a comparison of adults who are learning to read and skilled adult readers

The purpose of this study was to assess the role that phonological, orthographic, and contextual sources of information play in a group of adults who were learning to read compared to adult skilled readers. Participants read short paragraphs that contained a correct homophone, an incorrect homophone, or a spelling control. Target words were orthographically similar or dissimilar, and they appeared in context that predicted the target or was neutral with respect to the target. The pattern of data obtained for skilled readers was consistent with past work (Rayner et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 24(2), 476–497, 1998). Skilled readers showed no reading time differences between the correct homophone and the incorrect homophone, as long as the two were orthographically similar, but reading times on these words were faster than the spelling control condition. The pattern of data for the adults who were learning to read was different. These readers were actually better at noticing that an incorrect version of the homophone was present. Importantly, we did find consistent significant differences between the incorrect homophone condition and the spelling control condition. This suggests the adults who were learning to read use phonological codes during word recognition, but they do so less efficiently than skilled readers.     

The achievement ideology of Reading Wonders: a critical content analysis of success and failure in a core reading programme

In the early 1960s, researchers began to conduct content analyses of core reading programmes/basal readers. Although these researchers often adopted a critical perspective, and examined the ideological underpinnings of the texts, they failed to make an explicit connection between ideologies and reader access to the text. The study described here is a critical content analysis of texts contained within the core reading programme Reading Wonders. It addresses these research questions: What vision of success and failure is exemplified by selections in the fourth-grade Reading Wonders textbook?—and—To what extent are selections in this programme accessible to readers? Mobilizing MacLeod’s notion of achievement ideology, the study explores the contrast between the programme’s emphasis on individual success and the inaccessibility of the selections included in it. The analysis demonstrates that the achievement ideology is the foundation for most of the selections. It also shows that the complexity and unengaging quality of the basal reader interferes with the reader’s ability to access the included texts. I argue the Reading Wonders textbook serves to convince readers that personal and professional success is the norm in contemporary society, while failing to allow them to construct more than a surface-level meaning of the included selections.     

The significance of a process evaluation in interpreting the validity of an RCT evaluation of a complex teaching intervention: the case of Integrated Group Reading (IGR) as a targeted intervention for delayed Year 2 and 3 pupils

The significance of a process evaluation for understanding randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of complex teaching interventions in a classroom setting is discussed in relation to the evaluation of the Integrated Group Reading (IGR) programme trial. This process evaluation is based on realist principles and draws on different data sources. The findings indicate that the efficacy of a classroom-based complex intervention like IGR is hard to evaluate given the nature of the intervention and its context. These findings illustrate that a process evaluation should not be seen as a subsidiary study to the experimental trial, but as an independent study in its own right as it can shed light onto the setting up and running of the trial. The paper argues that RCTs by themselves do not necessarily provide the ‘best evidence’ and need to be supplemented by other evaluation perspectives.