A Comparative Study of Small Group Fluency Instruction

The present study investigated the reading development of small groups of learners making the transition from intentional decoding to fluent reading. The research focused on the relative effectiveness of repeated and wide reading as a means of developing reading fluency. It also looked at the importance of expressive, or prosodic, reading in concert with automatic and accurate word recognition. Three intervention strategies were selected: Repeated Reading, Wide Reading, and Listening Only. In order to evaluate these strategies, three second-grade classrooms were randomly assigned, without replacement, to the various intervention strategies. Six struggling readers from each class participated as a cohort. Additionally, a Control group made up of two students from each of the three participating classrooms was pre- and posttested. Findings indicated substantive differences in favor of the students in the Wide-Reading and Repeated Reading groups for word recognition in isolation, prosody, and correct words per minute and for the Wide Reading group in terms of comprehension.