Increasing Reading Fluency Performance of Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reading fluency has been identified as one of the essential skills students must develop in order to learn to read. Fluency is also a critical factor in reading comprehension (National Reading Panel [NRP], 2000). Many students, however, lack the ability to read age-appropriate materials fluently, including students with emotional and behavioral disorders. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the oral reading fluency, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension performance of five students with emotional and behavioral disorders as a result of using two reading interventions: repeated reading and listening teacher modeling. Both methods have been widely used and empirically evaluated as evidence-supported reading programs. During the repeated readings intervention, students repeatedly read a specific passage multiple times to a teacher without explicit assistance (Begeny, Krouse, Ross & Mitchell, 2009; Lo, Cooke & Starling, 2011; Stahl & Kuhn, 2002) in order to reach a predetermined criterion of words read correctly during a one-minute time trial (Lo et al., 2011). Teacher modeling involved the student receiving an explicit model of the text passage while following along silently. Under this condition, students were provided a correct model of the desired reading passage by a teacher prior to their attempt to read on their own (Dawson, Venn & Gunter, 2000). An alternating treatment design was employed to determine the effects of the two fluency interventions; i.e., repeated reading and teacher modeling. Results supported the repeated reading intervention followed by the teacher modeling as most effective for improving the oral reading fluency rates of students with emotional and behavioral disorders. Limitations and recommendations for future research are addressed.