Increasing students' reading comprehension involves the use of targeted strategies and effective instruction. Previous research has shown that instruction in individual skills such as vocabulary acquisition, reading fluency, writing, and story mapping help increases students' reading comprehension. However, few studies have explored combining these skills and their cumulative effects, if any, on reading comprehension. The purpose of this quasi-experimental secondary analysis study was to examine the effects of adding a reading comprehension instruction package (RCIP), which includes vocabulary acquisition, reading fluency, and writing, to instruction in story mapping alone. Constructivist theory was used as the theoretical framework for this study. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 8 students with low reading achievement as indicated by their performances on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The single-case, multiple-probe design across subjects was used to intermittently collect data, which were the correct responses per 3 minutes using the Curriculum Based Measure-Reading Maze. The data were visually analyzed by looking at data points and trend lines directionality using the percentage nonoverlapping data along with the Cohen's d effect size. Although this study showed mixed results and were not statistically significant, it could still contribute to positive social change. The findings have a small to medium effect size impact on students' reading comprehension; 3 out of 4 students who completed the study surpassed their expected goal. The results from this study may provide teachers with tools for improving the foundational reading skills of struggling readers, thus enabling their students to succeed in school and become productive members of society.

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The purpose of this study was to increase knowledge about how teachers view the importance of reading lessons in year one. The study also examined how teachers practically work with reading homework and how these teachers felt that it benefited the students' reading development. The study was conducted using semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight teachers working in primary school. All teachers who participated in the study are certifiedteachers to teach Swedish in primary school. The study is based on the socio-cultural perspective and pragmatism. Which means that students learn best in connection between theory and practice and where language is in focus. The results showed that the teachers who participated agreed that the ultimate purpose of the reading homework is to increase the students' reading fluency with the help of mass training. The teachers consider the reading homework necessary in year one. Repetitive reading is presented as an important aspect in students' early reading learning by both research and teachers. Reasons why teachers choose to work with reading homework differ somewhat. But the time aspect in school is something that teachers are critical of. The result shows that the teachers mean a certain reading must take place at home. Because of this the reading homework is considered a good aid by the teachers.

Many children in low-income areas are failing in schools, frequently due to substandard reading skills. Research has shown that early intervention can help alleviate this problem. However, most early intervention strategies are very expensive and labor intensive for school personnel. Furthermore, it is often not clear what programs will work with a certain student population due to their widely diverse backgrounds. In low-income schools, parents are often an ignored resource. Many teachers complain about lack of parent involvement, and yet most do nothing to solicit it. Using parents to help provide beginning reading practice for their children could be a way to involve families in the school and help children gain vital reading skills. This study investigated the effects of parent training in a fluency reading method called “Paired Reading” among low-income first grade students. A one-hour training sessions was offered at two different times to the parents of four first grade classes in an urban elementary school. Thirty-one participated. The children of these parents constituted the experimental group. This group was pretested and posttested to assess reading fluency, sight word recognition and reading attitudes. Forty-one students at a neighboring elementary school acted as the control group for this study. Qualitative interviews were also conducted on experimental group parents and teachers. The results indicated significant gains in reading fluency, sight word recognition and attitudes about reading. Also, there was a significant relationship between the minutes a child spent practicing Paired Reading with the parent and the amount of improvement the child made. Interview data suggested that parents welcomed this type of training session and enjoyed doing the activities with their children. Unfortunately, the interview data also indicated that teachers were negative about the efficacy of parent training sessions and had no immediate plans to implement such classes.

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Second language (L2) reading fluency has not received sufficient attention in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and applied linguistics, especially regarding the types of treatments that promote reading fluency (Grabe, 2009). Hence, this study was a longitudinal, quasi-experimental investigation of the effects of timed reading, repeated oral reading, and extensive reading on the development of reading fluency among Japanese university students. The eight purposes of this study were to: (a) better understand how timed reading, repeated oral reading, and extensive reading treatments contribute to reading fluency in terms of reading rate and comprehension over one academic year; (b) distinguish how extensive reading, timed reading, and repeated oral reading treatments differentially promote reading fluency; (c) elucidate on how timed reading, repeated oral reading, and extensive reading treatments affect the automatization of word recognition sub-processes over time; (d) investigate differences between the reading fluency treatment groups in terms of their word recognition sub-processes; (e) further understand how reading fluency treatments contribute to oral reading fluency; (f) examine differences in oral reading fluency between the reading fluency treatment groups; (g) determine how reading fluency training affects learners’ perception of their L2 reading self-efficacy; and (h) shed light on differences in L2 reading self-efficacy between reading fluency treatment groups. This study was conducted in a private university in western Japan. The participants (N = 101) were first- and second-year Japanese university students. These participants formed four quasi-experimental groups: (a) Group 1, labeled as the oral reading group, received a reading fluency treatment consisting of extensive reading, timed reading, and repeated oral reading; (b) Group 2, the timed reading group, participated in extensive reading and timed reading; (c) Group 3, the extensive reading group, did extensive reading only; and (d) Group 4, the comparison group, practiced speaking and communication activities. Data for this study were obtained using the following instruments: a vocabulary size test, timed reading tests, timed reading practice passages used throughout the treatment period, an extensive reading test, a lexical decision task, an antonym semantic decision task, a pseudoword homophone judgment task, an oral reading task, and an L2 reading self-efficacy questionnaire, a utility of the reading fluency treatments questionnaire, as well as individual interviews with 20 of the participants. Excluding the vocabulary size test, the timed reading treatment passages, the utility of the reading fluency treatments questionnaire, and the interviews, the other measures were administered three times over the course of one academic year—once prior, once in the middle, and once at the end of the reading fluency treatment period. Prior to conducting quantitative analyses on the data gathered with the instruments mentioned above, the L2 reading self-efficacy questionnaire data were analyzed using the Rasch rating-scale model in order to confirm the validity and reliability of the instrument as well as to transform the raw scores into equal interval measures. In addition, the Rasch model was used to check for interrater reliability and rater severity of the scores of the oral reading task. Data cleaning procedures were also applied to the reaction time and reading rate data. The data were then analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVAs and MAN(C)OVAs in order to ascertain differences in within-subjects and between-subjects measures. The results showed that the three reading fluency treatment groups made significant within-subjects increases in their reading fluency with the oral reading group making the most reading rate gains, followed by the timed reading group, and the extensive reading group. Moreover, the oral reading group generally outperformed the other groups on reading rate measures. However, the extensive reading group did not significantly outperform the comparison group. In addition, while the timed reading group had the fastest word recognition reaction times, the oral reading group made the most gains in orthographic, semantic, and phonological processing. Furthermore, no significant differences were found between the groups on orthographic processing, but the oral reading group, timed reading group had significantly faster semantic and phonological processing reaction times compared to the comparison group. With regards to oral reading fluency, the oral reading group made the most gains and achieved the highest scores, but the timed reading group also made significant gains. Finally, the oral reading groups’ L2 reading self-efficacy increased the most. The results of the study underscore the importance of using a multifaceted approach of extensive reading, timed reading, and repeated oral reading in the development of L2 reading fluency. Through this reading fluency training, the learners not only became more proficient readers in both silent and oral modes, but they also became more self-efficacious in L2 reading tasks. Ultimately, these learners became more empowered to achieve success in their L2 learning endeavors. / Teaching & Learning

本研究旨在探討運用點讀筆是否具有提升國中生之英語學習動機、英語朗讀流暢度及學習滿意度效益。此外，本研究亦探討場地獨立型與場地依賴型不同認知風格學生應用點讀筆進行英語學習，在提升英語學習動機、英語朗讀流暢度上是否具有差異。 本研究以桃園縣某公立國中兩班共62位七年級學生為研究對象，分為實驗組與控制組，實驗組以教師搭配點讀筆進行英語教學，控制組則以教師施予傳統教學方式進行。量化資料分析來自一分鐘口語流暢度之前後測、學習動機與滿意度問卷。所得資料以描述性統計、t考驗、單因子共變數分析與Pearson積差相關進行資料分析與研究結果歸納，質化資料分析包含學生訪談問卷之開放問題與教師教學省思。 本研究之主要發現如下： 1.相較於施予傳統英語教學的控制組，教師應用點讀筆輔助英語教學的實驗組，整體學習動機明顯優於控制組； 2.無論是施予傳統英語教學的控制組或是教師應用點讀筆輔助英語教學的實驗組，兩組的英語朗讀流暢度表現無顯著差異，但在口語朗讀字數進步幅度上實驗組明顯優於控制組；3. 教師應用點讀筆輔助英語教學能顯著提升不同認知風格的學生之英語學習動機； 4.教師應用點讀筆輔助英語教學對不同認知風格的學生英語朗讀流暢度表現無顯著差異，但能顯著提升不同認知風格的學生的口語朗讀字數進步幅度，研究結果顯示實驗組場地獨立與場地依賴學生的英語朗讀字數進步幅度明顯優於控制組； 5.實驗組學生使用點讀筆的次數與口語流暢度具有顯著正相關；6.實驗組學生的學習滿意度顯著優於控制組，實驗組學生自覺應用點讀筆輔以英語教學使他們更勇於開口朗讀英文、會注意發音與語調，對英語學習更有自信、上課更專心，也更積極參與課堂活動。 總結而論，本研究結果顯示教師應用點讀筆輔助英語教學，為一種有助於提升國中學生的英語學習動機、學習滿意度及英語朗讀能力的有效教學模式。國中英語教師可參考此結果，善加運用多元的數位資源融合於英語學習的教學活動之中，以觸發更有效的英語學習效果。最後，根據研究結果，本研究亦提出教師應用點讀筆輔助英語教學在教學、教材設計及教育行政單位配合之建議，希望能作為國中英語教學設計與實務教學上的參考。 / The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the intelligent pen on EFL junior high school students’ oral reading fluency, learning motivation and learning satisfaction. It also attempts to compare the performance among students of different congnitive style on learning motivation and oral reading fluency. The pretest-posttest nonequivalent group design was adopted. The subjects were two groups of the junior high school students, one as the experimental group instructed by the application of intelligent pen and the other, as the control group, instructed by the traditional lecture method. At first, a pretest was conducted to measure the students’ English oral reading fluency and learning motivation. At last, English oral reading fluency, English learning motivation and satisfaction were also measured as parts of posttests. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, t-test, ANCOVA,and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. As for the data collected from the students’ responses to the questionnaires, they are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The following were the main findings of this study. 1. The experimental group’s posttest learning motivation score was higher than the control group’s. Compared the experimental group’s pretest and posttest learning motivation scores, the posttest levels were significantly higher than the pretest ones. For the control group, there was no significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores. 2. The experimental group’s posttest English oral reading fluency score was not significantly higher than the control group’s. However, the experimental group made progress more significantly than the control group. For the experimental group and the control group, there were significant difference between their own pretest and posttest scores, because the control group was still offered more chances to read English aloud than before. 3.Not only field-independent (FI) students but also field-dependent (FD) ones were superior in the learning motivation. 4.Both the Field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) students of the experimental group made progress in a gain of WCPM more significantly than the control group. 5. A student’s oral reading fluency score was positive correlation with the frequency of using the intelligent pen. 6. The experimental group’s posttest learning satisfaction scores were significantly higher than the control group’s.The findings suggest that the students of the experimental group’s learning satisfaction toward English had improved significantly after the proposed instruction. Most students reported that not only their pronunciation and intonation had become better but also they had become more concentrative in class and more active in participating in the classroom learning owing to the intelligent pen. In conclusion, compared with the traditional lecture method, applying intelligent pen to English teaching had significantly positive effect on promoting junior high school students’ English oral reading proficiency, learning motivation, and learning satisfaction. Furthermore, the students held positive attitudes towards the proposed instruction. Designing teaching curriculum, the English teachers in junior high schools may take the effects and differences into consideration.Meanwhile, the teachers can apply the digital resource in the English teaching activities to achieve more effective learning results. Hence, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are provided in the end.