Effects of Reading Fluency Instruction on Reading Comprehension: A Case Study of Koforidua Senior High Technical School

Abstract

Research on reading has indicated that children who fail to achieve reading competence in their early grades experience reading comprehension difficulties later in the upper levels of education. Owing to such reasons, many senior high school (SHS) students in Ghana are not able to cope with high learning that demands reading, and they lack comprehension strategies aimed at helping them construct meaning from text. Reading fluency, with its components such as reading sub skills and comprehension skills (as conceptualized by Samuels 2002), has had a very little attention in the Ghanaian educational system as a reading comprehension instruction approach, though this approach has gained international recognition as a predictor of comprehension. The study sought to examine the effectiveness of reading fluency skills instruction as a means of improving reading comprehension in SHS struggling readers. The study adopted a nonrandomized control group pre-test-post-test design in the data collection process. It used 120 participants made up of two Form One classes from Koforidua Senior High school in the Eastern Region of Ghana, and administered pre-test and post-test to both experimental and control groups, and intervention to the experimental group. The study investigated three main variables, namely, reading sub skills, comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge. Under sub skills, reading rate (WCPM), word reading accuracy (WRA), real word reading (RWR), pseudo word reading (PWR) and phonemic awareness (PA) were evaluated. For comprehension skills, ‘big idea’ strategy, ‘right there’, ‘putting it together’, ‘making connections’, ‘main idea’ strategy and ‘text summary’ strategy (Denton et al. 2007) were assessed. Lastly, the participants were assessed on vocabulary knowledge. Reading fluency skills instruction promoted significant and positive associations involving all the reading sub skills variables in the experimental group. After the exposure to a regular classroom instruction programme, the control group had only one significant positive association involving reading rate and word reading accuracy. The experimental group showed significant associations involving three of the comprehension variables, namely, ‘big idea’, ‘right there’ and ‘making connections’ (Dention et al. 2007), while the control group showed associations involving two comprehension strategies, ‘right there’ and ‘making connections’ (Denton et al. 2007). The correlation analysis showed that reading fluency skills instruction has a significant and positive connection with reading sub skills improvement; indicating that reading sub skills have a higher comprehension predicting ability when compared with comprehension skills/strategies. The literature indicates that reading comprehension intervention that takes care of students’ sub skills needs at the senior high school level in Ghana is virtually unavailable. The study, therefore, proposes a technique that handles reading comprehension instruction from the sub skills level to the comprehension skills level. This approach will arm students with the necessary reading sub skills for both word and sentence processing before they complement them with comprehension strategies