How Will Repeated Oral Reading Practice Impact Reading Fluency Case Study

How Will Repeated Oral Reading Practice Impact Reading Fluency - Case Study Example 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. â€Å"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). ... â€Å"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 opp ortunities 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