WILLIAM J. THERRIEN. University of ... 2005/2006; Schirmer & Williams, 2003). Of the five areas .... RAAC intervention (Therrien, Gormley,. & Kubina, 2006) ...
REPEATED READING AS AN INSTRUCTIONAL INTERVENTION WITH DEAF READERS: EFFECT ON FLUENCY AND READING ACHIEVEMENT BARBARA
R.
SCHIRMER
University of Detroit
J. THERRIEN
WILLIAM
University of Iowa LAURA SCHAFFER
Michigan School for the Deaf TODD
N.
SCHIRMER
Napa State Hospital The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a repeated reading intervention on the reading fluency and achievement of deaf elementary level students. The repeated reading strategy was used with four second-grade deaf students individually two to three times weekly over a period of five weeks as a supplement to their regular reading instruction. Analysis showed that students significantly improved their reading speed on passages that were reread during each session as well as on a generalized measure of reading fluency. Comprehension did not improve overall but students performed as well on inferential questions as on factual questions. Overall results indicate that repeated reading has the potential for improving the reading fluency of deaf students but that pairing a fluency strategy with a comprehension strategy may be more effective than focusing only on fluency.
For students who are deaf, research has focused primarily on understanding the reasons underlying historically low reading achievement levels and investigating interventions aimed at improving word recognition and comprehension (Luckner, Sebald, Cooney, Young, & Muir, 2005/2006; Schirmer & Williams, 2003). Of the five areas found by the National Reading Panel (2000) to be essential to reading instruction- phonemic awareness, phonic analysis, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension -only interventions aimed at improving vocabulary and text comprehension had been investigated at the time the report was issued (Schirmer
& McGough, 2005). Subsequently, a few researchers have investigated approaches aimed at enabling deaf readers to access visually phonological cues for word recognition (Narr, 2008; Trezek & Malmgren, 2005; Trezek & Wang, 2006; Trezek, Wang, Woods, Gampp, & Paul, 2007). No research to date has investigated approaches designed to improve the reading fluency of deaf students or determined whether fluency instruction has a concomitant effect on the reading achievement of deaf readers (Easterbrooks & Huston, 2008). Fluency has been referred to as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension (Welsch, 2007). Repeated reading
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Repeated Reading... / 169 for fluency has been found to be effective in increasing reading rate, accuracy, and comprehension of students with and without disabilities (Meyer & Felton, 1999; Schwanenflugel, Meisinger, & Wisenbaker, 2006; Tam, Heward, & Heng, 2006; Therrien, 2004). Repeated reading is a technique in which the student rereads a short and meaningful passage until a criterion level of fluency is achieved (Rasinski & Padak, 2008; Samuels, 1979). Though significant improvements in reading fluency among nondisabled students and students with learning disabilities have been found, these improvements have not consistently translated into gains in reading comprehension (e.g., Bryant, et al., 2000; Freeland, Skinner, Jackson, McDaniel, & Smith, 2000; Sindelar, Monda, & O'Shea, 1990; Vaughn, Chard, Bryant, Coleman, & Kouzekanani, 2000). The majority of studies that found significant improvement in students' comprehension carefully matched the material to students' ability levels (AlberMorgan, Ramp, & Anderson, 2007; Sindelar et al., 1990). Given the research literature on repeated readings, it would appear to be a promising strategy for improving fluency and comprehension with another population of students who struggle with reading--students who are deaf. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a repeated reading intervention on the reading fluency and achievement of deaf elementary level students.
Method Design
Design of the study was experimental, with a combination of single subject and quasi-experimental using pre-post measures. Participantsand Setting
Participants were selected from a convenience sample of second graders at a state school for the deaf. Four of the six students met the criteria of reading at least at the first grade level at the outset of the intervention. Three students are male, two have parents who are Deaf, and all use American Sign Language in school. Three have profound hearing losses and one has a severe hearing loss. Ages ranged from 7; 1 to 7; 11 at the outset of the study. Before the study began, three students were assessed at early- to mid-first grade reading level on Running Records (Clay, 2000) and four reading subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson III Achievement Tests reading (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001). One student's assessment on these measures was highly variable, ranging from mid-second on letter-word identification and passage comprehension (W-J III) to fifth grade level on reading vocabulary and fluency (W-J III and Running Records). The instructor was a certified teacher of the deaf with six years of teaching experience and rated as a proficient signer on the Sign Communication Proficiency Interview. The school describes its curriculum as a regular public school curriculum with modifications in terms of presenting information via American Sign Language and
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written English. School size was approximately 160 students during the academic year in which the study took place; class sizes per grade at the elementary level ranged from 4-9 students. In addition to the teacher of the deaf, the second grade class had a teacher aide and a student teacher from a local university. American Sign Language (ASL) was the language of instruction. Speech and language services were conducted in pull-out sessions with the Speech-Language clinician. Materials
A total of 300 original passages (50 passages at grades I through 6 according to Flesch-Kincaid) comprised the corpus of reading passages available for intervention implementation. Passage length was set so that each could be read in I to 1.25 minutes by hearing students with oral reading speeds at the 50th percentile for their respective instructional reading level, each passage contained a complete narrative, and passage topics were wide ranging and included themes commonly found in children's literature. Four factual and four inferential questions accompanied each passage. Questions were developed based on the following operational definitions: "Correct responses to factual questions can be underlined directly in the text without requiring the integration of information from multiple sentences. Correct responses to inferential questions either cannot be located in the text (i.e., cannot be underlined) or require integration of information from multiple sentences" (Davey & McBride, 1986, p. 257). The passages and comprehension questions had been used
in prior research (Therrien, Wickstrom, & Jones, 2006). Procedure
The Reread-Adapt and Answer-Comprehend (RAAC) intervention is a supplemental program designed to include essential instructional components from both the repeated reading and question generation literature bases. Research on RAAC has been promising in demonstrating significant improvement in reading speed on passages that are reread, positive impact on inferential comprehension of intervention passages, significant gains in oral reading fluency of independent passages, and the potential to improve the overall reading achievement of students with learning disabilities (Therrien, Wickstrom et al., 2006). The repeated reading portion of the RAAC intervention (Therrien, Gormley, & Kubina, 2006), modified for this study, was used with the students individually two to three times weekly over a period of five weeks. Because of absences and scheduling conflicts, the students received an uneven number of intervention sessions, which ranged from to 8 to 12. The intervention was supplemental to the students' regular reading instruction program, which did not include reading fluency as a component. The passages were selected to match the instructional reading level of each student as determined by their scores on Running Records and the WoodcockJohnson III Achievement Tests reading subtests that were administered prior to the outset of the study. For the student with the highly variable scores, the lower scores were used to select passage level in order
Repeated Reading... / 171 to guarantee that the material would not be too difficult. The teacher followed a lesson plan format to ensure fidelity to the steps of the intervention. As introduction, the teacher explained that the student would read the story aloud and/or in sign (depending on the child's preference; three children used sign only and one child used simultaneous voice and sign) as quickly as she or he could and if the student encountered an unknown word and could not figure it out, the teacher would assist by providing the word. For the first reading, the student read the passage from his or her own copy, the teacher timed the reading and notated errors on her copy of the story during reading, and the teacher recorded the time and numbers of errors when the student finished reading. The student was asked to reread the story until reaching the criterion level of no more than two errors or until reading the passage four times. (We did not apply the second RAAC criterion of correct words per minute as we expected signed reading to be slower than oral reading and no norms for signed reading have yet been established.) At that point, the student was asked the comprehension questions and the teacher recorded the answers. Analysis and Results Pre- and post-test measures included Running Records and four reading subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson III Achievement Tests -Letter-Word Identification, Reading Fluency, Reading Comprehension, and Reading Comprehension. Session intervention measures included the number of readings to reach
criteria, word reading errors per session, reading time of each passage per session, and number of comprehension questions answered correctly. Session intervention measures were graphed to visually display the data (see Tables 1-4). No pattern of improvement was shown for number of readings to reach criteria or number of comprehension questions answered correctly. The pattern among answers to factual and inferential questions indicated that the students answered inferential questions correctly approximately as often as they answered factual questions correctly. A consistent pattern of improvement was evident for word reading errors and reading time of each passage per session except for student NT, whose pattern of performance indicated that the material was at his independent reading level and not challenging enough to demonstrate improvement in fluency beyond the first reading. This is the student with the highly variable scores on the reading measures so it is obvious that in trying to guarantee the material would not be too difficult, we had selected material that was too easy. Pre-post data was analyzed using a dependent t-test. We found significant results for two measures--Running Records at the p
