Oral Reading by Learners and Its Effect on Reading Ability
203M040 H. K.
Apparently the recent trend in English education in Japan has come to put more emphasis on oral reading. A lot of books provide teachers with practical application of oral reading and magazines for English teachers sometimes run feature articles concerning reading aloud in classrooms. Plenty of practical reports have been released by teachers who successfully incorporated oral reading into their classes. As a matter of fact, most English teachers in Japan, including myself, take it for granted that oral reading definitely has a favorable effect on language learning.
It is surprising, however, that theoretical proof of the effectiveness of oral reading cannot be found in abundance. Many teachers make much use of oral reading in their classes without the theoretical knowledge behind it. They seem to believe that there is an explicit theory reinforcing their teaching style even if they do not know what it is. In fact, hardly any papers have been written in English that deal directly with the effects of oral reading. This is the reason why I decided to take up oral reading as the topic to investigate in my thesis. For the investigation, I scrutinized many academic papers for the rationale behind oral reading from different perspectives and I carried out an experiment. Even though the experiment was simple and short, an interesting result emerged which requires further consideration.
In chapter one, the background of the effects of oral reading was discussed. As mentioned above, there is not much preceding research on the matter. Therefore I focused my attention on relating discussions of various aspects of language teaching to oral reading. Academic papers on comprehensible input, reading process, neuroscience, and pronunciation instruction were examined.
In chapter two, I described how the investigation was conducted. For the investigation, I formulated the following research question: Does oral reading by learners have a favorable effect on reading comprehension? In order to explore this research question, I did a short-term experiment in a quasi-experimental design. The experiment involved two first-year high school classes which I am teaching.
In chapter three, the data obtained from the experiment were analyzed and the results were reported. In the two pretests, no statistical differences were not found, which means it can be assumed that, before the treatment, there were no differences between the two groups in basic level of English competence. As to the two posttest, however, contrasting results emerged. One bore the significant difference, whereas the other didn't.
Therefore, in chapter four, I discussed rather inconsistent results and draw some implications both for the possible application to the actual teaching and the future research.