Action Research Project

Bridget Binns
Loyola Marymount University
EDES 6081 English Language Learners
Introduction
According to Justin Minkel in Education Week (2014), Achievement data suggest that
English-language learners lag far behind their peers (p..5). In order for English Language
Learners to receive the best education possible, strategies must be used to help these students
become more successful in the classroom. The student I have chosen to focus my English
Language Learner study is Nick, a third grader at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, a TK-8
Catholic School situated in Downey. This suburban, upscale community is located about fifteen
minutes northeast of Long Beach. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic School is one of the
most expensive Catholic schools in the area, and many of the children who attend the school live
in Downey. Nick is one of the many students who speak Spanish in the home. The school is
composed of 80% Hispanic. Nick was born in the United States and seems to know English
quite well from my conversations that I have had with him. For example, when I give him
directions and verbal cues, he can follow them quite easily, although I may have to remind him
more than once. However, I did ask him if he speaks Spanish at home, and he told me that he
speaks Spanish with his grandma and his sister.
The school began this brand new model for teaching called team teaching. Therefore,
there are three teachers for two grades. I am on the third/fourth grade team. with two other
teachers. Our team will sometimes have Nick stay for academic support after school to help
him with his academics ranging anywhere from Math to Reading. Our team of teachers divide

the subjects and at times, we will do station teaching where two teachers are in the same
classroom. One of the subjects I teach is third grade Reading, and I have noticed that Nick has
a very difficult time when reading aloud. He has trouble with basic phonics and decoding of
words. Read alouds can become quite cumbersome when Nick reads aloud. His reading
fluency is very poor, and he needs an intervention strategy to help him become a better reader.
According to Christy (2005), A student who seemed to be successful in communicating on an
interpersonal level is unable to apply those skills to an academic situation(p.25). Not only does
Nick have difficulty with his reading fluency, he also has difficulty verbalizing his answers
when responding to questions that he is asked in class. Based on what I already have learned
about Nick, the question for my research study is the following: In what ways can I improve
Nicks reading fluency?
Lit Review
Guided reading is one of the intervention strategies that teachers use to improve reading
fluency. As Hulan (2010) states, Responding to literature through discussion is a way for
students to develop ownership of a task and a text (p.43). Nick is a very quiet child, so
articulating with others what he is reading may help him improve his reading fluency. As Zugel
(2010) discusses the fact that students with varying reading levels have really posed a challenge
for many teachers in todays schools (p.2). Zugel further states that, Without acquiring the skills
necessary to read text, students have no chance for understanding (p.2). This has become
evident when Nick is asked to respond to what he is reading. He often does not know the
answer or has difficulty articulating the answer, since he has difficulty reading the words. There
is a strong relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension (Zugel 2010, p.3).

In order to develop reading fluency, a few other skills require some extra attention as
well. Kuhn and Schwanenflugel (2006) say it is essential that students learn to develop their
background knowledge, phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondences, construct
meaning from text, and more (p.2). All of these skills are necessary in order to help improve his
reading fluency. The best way for struggling readers to improve reading fluency is through a lot
of practice (Kuhn and Schwanenflugel 2006, p.2). Some common classroom practices including
round robin reading, popcorn reading, etc. do not offer adequate support for literacy learning
(Ash and Kuhn 2006, p.155). I have used those common practices in my own classroom
throughout the years, so I was surprised to find that those strategies are not effective. Even
though those particular classroom practices have shown to be ineffective, research shows that
repeated readings are effective (Dowhower, 1994). Researchers typically observed in the
classroom that reading practices often composed of students reading new material on a consistent
basis. Automatic word recognition may come more naturally if students were repeatedly given
the same text as opposed to reading new material (MacKinnon, 2006). According to the data,
Repeated readings are a highly effective approach for students who are considered to be slow,
disfluent readers (Dowhower, 1994). A repeated reading is a reading strategy in which the
teacher selects a passage that the student reads aloud to the teacher. If a student says a word
incorrectly, or hesitates longer than a few seconds, then the teacher reads the word aloud to the
student. The student repeats the word correctly. If a student requests help on a word, then the
teacher will either say the word aloud or provide the definition of the word. The student will
continue to reread the passage until he/she receives an acceptable reading fluency level (What
Works Clearinghouse, 2014). Using this strategy is one way that I could use to help Nick
improve his reading fluency.

Gafoor and Remia (2013) say, Understanding meaning from the written text is crucial to
effective reading (p.128). Also in the research findings, a students reading comprehension level
strongly affects his/her language skills creating deficiencies in spoken language (Mayers &
Bottin, 2008). Nick has difficulty verbalizing his thoughts and communicating what he read
since his reading fluency is below grade-level. According to Ehri (2005), when children first
begin to read, they first acquire elementary decoding skills, and then gradually apply these skills
with greater accuracy and speed, leading to an increasingly automated process that recognizes
multi-letter units and whole words(p.167). Nick first needs to work on his decoding skills
before he can improve his reading fluency. According to Blachman (1994), Children must
understand that speech is comprised of sound segments at the level of phonemes in order to read
the words in print (p.270). It is imperative to start a reading intervention with Nick as a third
grader because according to (Graney, 2000), Problems with reading tend to begin at the onset of
reading instruction, persist, and become more severe with the passage of time (p.27).
Besides using repeated readings, research suggests using peer-mediated intervention. As
Hoff &Robinson (2002) state, Peer-mediated interventions may be an efficient method to have
students practice tasks to improve fluency with basic academic skills like oral reading (p.1556).
Research indicates that student-peers are good source of reinforcement for each other (Daly,
2011). There does seem to be more research indicating that repeated readings are an effective
reading intervention in order to improve reading fluency. According to What Works Clearing
House (2014), Repeated reading can be used with students who have developed initial wordreading skills but demonstrate inadequate reading fluency for their grade level (p.1). More
research indicates that re-reading passages has been found to increase students oral reading
rates and accuracy, which leads to better comprehension of passages (MacKinnon, 1996).

Furthermore, repeated reading has shown to have a positive effect on readers vocabulary
development, and seems to enable readers to read in larger and more syntactically and
phonologically appropriate phrases (Dowhower, 1994). Most of this research suggests that the
repeated reading strategy would be most effective to use with my target student. I plan on
implementing this strategy throughout the remainder of this research to see if this intervention
improves his reading fluency.
Cycle I-Baseline Data
Nick is a student in the third grade class. I teach Nick Reading, Math, Writing, and Social
Studies. At my school, we team teach, so Nick has two other teachers who also teach him various
subjects. Two teachers in the same classroom teach some of the above-mentioned subjects. I
decided to choose Nick for this study to help him improve his poor reading performance. Nick
really struggles with his reading fluency. He tends to trip over words that the average student in
his class is able to pronounce. I have the students read aloud in class or do choral reading when
we are reading a class book. We just finished reading Trumpet of the Swan, and I noticed that
whenever Nick was called upon to read aloud, he was unable to master reading the words
successfully. Therefore, to gather some reading fluency data for Nick, I had him read aloud some
short stories for me. As he read aloud, I kept a log of the number of mistakes he made while
reading. The chart below reveals the name of the short stories as well as the percentage of
fluency.
Reading Fluency Data before Intervention

Reading Story
Lucky Lucy (108 words)
Pond Day (99 words)
Basketball Practice (183 words)

Number of mispronunciations
35% fluency
42% fluency
56% fluency

This baseline data shows that Nick mispronounces words throughout a text making it very
difficult for him to articulate the words in the story. I also noticed that while reading, Nick
sometimes does not pause when there is a period or any kid of punctuation mark.
Nick is very quiet in class and when he is asked questions to check his understanding, he
has difficulty articulating the answers. When I met with his mom, I suggested that Nick read
aloud to her each evening to help improve his reading fluency. The challenge for Nick seems to
be his reading fluency perhaps due to his poor phonics and decoding skills. I will spend the
intervention period using the repeated reading strategy to help Nick improve his reading fluency.
Cycle 2-Intervention and New Benchmark
During the intervention, Nick read aloud the above stories to the teacher. The repeated
reading strategy to help improve reading fluency suggests that a student must reread a selection
aloud as many times as it takes before he/she can improve his/her reading fluency. The goal is to
suggest that rereading a selection will not only help a student read that selected passage more
fluently; it will also help improve reading fluency with other selected passages. Nick reread the
above stories aloud. Below is a chart demonstrating the number of mistakes and the number of
rereads for each story. The following stories were completed among three separate days and were
read in this order.
Reading Fluency Log During Intervention
Name of

1st Read

2nd Read

3rd Read

4th Read

story

35% fluency

50% fluency

97% fluency

100% fluency

Lucky Lucy
Pond Day

42% fluency

97% fluency

100% fluency

Basketball
Practice

56% fluency

97% fluency

100% fluency

The above-mentioned data shows the reading fluency percentage that Nick had accomplished
with each story. Defined by the repeated reading strategy, when Nick came across a word that he
could not pronounce, I would say the word and then he repeated the word before continuing the
story. If his reading fluency was not 100%, then he reread the passage until he could fluently
read all of the words in the short story. As the data suggests, Nick became a more fluent reader
the more he reread a story. This data also indicates that he did not need to reread the last two
passages as he did the first passage to achieve the 100% reading fluency; this clearly indicates
that the repeated reading strategy is effective to improve reading fluency.
I have also spoken to his mother since the intervention period. She said to me that she
has noticed a change in his reading fluency. His mother has had him read aloud to her in the
evenings, and she has also noticed a considerable improvement in his reading fluency. Nick has
read aloud in class since the intervention. We are currently reading aloud James and the Giant
Peach, which is not an easy book to read for a third grader. Nick now reads with nearly 100%
accuracy while reading aloud the class book. He has even been volunteering to read, which he
never did in the past. Nick seems to be very proud of his accomplishments and appears to have a
more joyful attitude towards reading.

Conclusion
It was such a joy to work with Nick and to see his reading fluency improve one step at a
time. The repeated reading strategy worked for him. The more he reread a passage, the better he

became with his reading fluency and the more confident he felt about reading. As the data
suggests, Nick clearly improved his reading fluency. When the students are allowed to read aloud
with a partner, I noticed that he is much more willing to read with others since his confidence in
reading has increased.
Before the intervention, he tried making excuses as to why he could not/did not want to
read with another person. He felt concerned about what his classmates may think of his reading
since his reading fluency was not the same as with the rest of the class. Even though these
repeated readings are a good strategy, this does not mean that this strategy would work for all
students. More research is needed to determine what other phonics/decoding strategies that could
be used to help improve a students reading fluency.

Although this strategy may not be

guaranteed to work with all students, Nick definitely benefitted from this intervention; he is now
a more confident and fluent reader.
Reference List
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