Title

Promoting gains in reading fluency by rereading phrasally-cued text

Date of Completion

January 2004

Keywords

Education, Reading|Psychology, Experimental

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

The goal of this study was to bolster reading fluency in second grade readers by instituting training using variants of the repeated readings method in conjunction with a text formatting manipulation. Accordingly, this study investigated and compared the effectiveness of text-based and word-based rereading procedures for promoting fluency and comprehension in developing readers who are able to decode but not yet to read fluently. Repeated readings of text printed with spaces between phrases and ends of lines at clause boundaries (syntactically-cued text), repeated readings of text printed with conventional (uncued text) layout, and repeated readings of lists of difficult words from text were compared. Computer-based guided repeated readings training intervened between a pretest and post-test reading of text. Afterwards, the effects of the three conditions of repeated readings training were measured on a variety of dependent measures. Each condition of repeated readings training had some measurable benefit on one or more of the experimental measures obtained from reading aloud. Repeated readings practice with whole text benefited fluency and comprehension more than practice with words from the texts. Reading with natural prosody was most strongly facilitated by repeated readings of phrase-cued text, as predicted. ^

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