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MA3C0102 甘甘 The implementation of a Balanced Reading Program in an Elementary EFL classroom: A case study

MA3C0102 甘蘋 The implementation of a Balanced Reading Program in an Elementary EFL classroom: A case study

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MA3C0102 甘蘋

The implementation of a Balanced Reading Program in an

Elementary EFL classroom: A case study

Outline Chapter One Introduction

• Background and Motivation

• Purposes of the Study

• Research Question of the Study

• Significance of the Study

Chapter Two Literature Review

• Theories and Studies of the Balanced Reading

Instruction

• The Theories of Reading

• The Role of Storybooks in Children’s Early Literacy

Chapter Three Methodology

• Background of the Subjects:

• Balanced Reading Instruction

• Instruments

• Procedures of this study

• Data Analysis

Chapter one IntroductionBackground and Motivation• MOE (2008), applying phonics to listening,

speaking, reading and writing (5-1-6)• Adams (1990) pointed out that phonics is an effective

way for teaching students to read• However, phonics has been regarded as more

pronunciation instruction than reading instruction• Words or sentences from most of

textbooks are not fit for the pupils’ language experiences, rather than sentences with related meanings or texts with meaningful context, which are much closer to real reading (Cunningham, 1991).

Background and Motivation• MOE(2008), students can predict the meanings of

words or sentences from the storybooks or contextual sentences (3-2-7).

• Students can comprehend the daily conversation, simple stories or radio programs, even to write down the key words or sentences (5-2-3)

• Learning English is not merely practicing sound-spelling relationships but also including meaning making.

Background and Motivation• Riley and Burrell (2007), story sharing played a

considerable role in children’s literacy at the very early stage of reading and writing learning

• Providing learners with storytelling which is the meaningful and authentic learning environment is the nature of whole language approach (Shen & Huang, 1997)

• But, whole language does not promote spelling skills (Graham, 2000),and reading of predictable texts does not develop word recognition skills as reliably as alternatives (Johnston, 2000), and does not produce as certain vocabulary growth (Swanborn et al., 1999)

Background and Motivation

• “Balanced Reading Instruction “(BRI) is a method of combining phonics and whole language approaches to build reading proficiency (Donat, 2006)

• These researchers applied balanced reading instruction to examine the effectiveness of phonics instruction with storybooks on word recognition and reading comprehension of EFL learners (Fu, 2008; Kuan, 2011; Liaw, 2003; Tsai, 2006).

Research Question of the Study

1. How does the BRP affect the word recognition and word spelling?

2. How does the BRP affect the reading comprehension and reading attitudes?

3. What are the potential problems encountered to students on adopting the BRP?

4. What are the potential problems encountered to teachers on adopting the BRP?

Significance of the Study

• Several previous researches shown the positive effects of BRI on learner’s English word recognition, reading comprehension, reading attitude, and reading motivation

• Most of them investigated in quantitative and qualitative research

• Only Shen, Leou, & Pan (2010) integrated BRI into EFL elementary classrooms observing two struggling students as case studies in qualitative research

• Another researcher Wang (2012) did an action research on BRI on the fifth grade students in Pen-Hu

• This study will present the affection of BRI on elementary school students’ word recognition, word spelling, reading comprehension, and reading attitudes with children storybooks as a case study

CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW Theories and Studies of the Balanced Reading

Instruction

• Background of Balanced Reading Instruction• Adams (1990), called “reading wars”, this debate

centered on which instructional method was most effective way to enhance children’s reading achievement.

• Phonics instruction facilitates EFL young learners to decode words effectively, then, decoding helps in the improvement of word recognition, and, finally, improves reading fluency

• However, some have argued against the utility of extensive phonics instruction because the English does not contain a perfect one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds (Hittleman, 1988; Smith, 1988)

• the whole language approach teach vocabulary, spelling, and grammar contextually in the process of top-down , instead of doing isolated exercises such as systematic phonics drills in the process of bottom- up (Brooks, 2005).

• However, due to the low socio-economic status , students do not fare well with whole language when evaluated with standardized measures ( Jeynes & Littell, 2000)

• Suggest that literacy instruction should promote the interaction between the skilled aspects of reading (e.g. phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge, letter-sound association) and the meaning-based aspects of reading (e.g. vocabulary, comprehension) (Bingham & Hall-Kenyon, 2013).

• The Meaning of Balanced Reading Instruction

• It combines phonics instruction with the whole language approach to demonstrate skills and meaning and meet the reading needs

• Includes community, home, and library involvement as well as structured classroom plans and use of activities such as read alouds, guided reading, shared readings, and independent reading and writing ( Fountas & Pinnell).

The Theories of Reading

• Word recognition• Perfetti (1985), the processes of word recognition

include letter recognition, phonetic activation, and semantic encoding. ( orthography, pronunciation, meaning)

• Phonics skills and sight words are two important techniques, especially for beginning readers ( Wynn,1988)

• Word spelling• “Spelling here is not the spelling of lists and rote

learning. Rather it is introduced as an integral part of writing: in essence, the process of encoding. Spelling is explained as a special and extremely important part of literacy that involves phonics, the linking of phonemes to graphemes.” (Buckland & Fraser, 2008)

• Three spelling skills —(1) Phonemic Awareness to distinguish the sounds, (2) rules that govern possible encoding of those sounds, and (3) visual memory—all play a part in spelling them correctly

• Reading comprehension

• It is defined as the level of understanding of writing

• Adams (1990) considered that instant and effective word recognition is vital to reading proficiency as student’s reading comprehension capability will be hindered with too much time consumption in analyzing and processing individual words

• Motivation and attitude are important factors involved incomprehension process

• Reading attitude

• "a system of feelings related to reading which causes the learner to approach or avoid a reading situation" (p. 1). ( Mckenna& Kear,1995)

• Yamashita (2004), provided four sub-components of reading attitude (comfort, anxiety, value ascribed to reading, and self-perception as a reader)

• Positive L1 reading attitude had strong impact on L2 reading ( Yamashita, 2007)

The Role of Storybooks in Children’s Early Literacy• As children predict what is going on next from

listening to a story to reading a story, they would establish effective reading skills ( Raines & Canady, 1990).

• Many studies showed that the application of story experiences result in positive benefits in various areas of children’s language learning ( Cho, Choi & Krachen,2008; Isbell, Sobol,Lindauer&Lowrance, 2004).

Chapter Three Methodology Backgrounds of the subjects• The School : small-size elementary school

with one class in every grade; a rural community in Tainan

• The students: 12 sixth graders

Balanced Reading Instruction• Teaching materials: six storybooks• Teaching process: based on the sequence

of whole-part-whole (Strickland, 1998)

Instruments• The pre-test and the post-test of English

word recognition• The pre-test and the post-test of English

word spelling• The pre-test and the post-test of English

reading comprehension• The open-ended questionnaires of reading

attitudes• Classroom observations• Interviews• Teacher reflective journal

Procedure of this study• 80 mins per week, lasting 8weeks• Lesson plan: ( first period for teaching

phonics; second period for storytelling) Data Analysis• T-test • Qualitative Analysis

First period Second period

Warm-up (5mins)

Presentation: (15mins) Presentation: (15mins)

1. Storytelling Phonics instruction

2. New words and sentence pattern

Practice, activity (15mins) Practice, activity, worksheet (15mins)

(focus on reading and speaking)

Wrap-up (5mins) Wrap- up (5mins)

Summary of the story Assigning homework