Date of Award

1989

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

First Advisor

Lea M. McGee

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Communicative Reading Strategies, an integrated approach to remedial reading instruction, on the reading, writing, and oral language proficiency of poor readers. Twenty eight third graders with poor reading and language abilities were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Communicative Reading Strategies (CRS) were employed with the experimental group. CRS treats reading as an integrated language process. Techniques were used such as: (1) providing orienting information, (2) clarifying the author's intention, (3) reducing the linguistic complexity of the text, (4) reiterating and conjoining ideas into complex propositions, and (5) revising the message until the child understands both the content and the intent of the author's communication. The facilitator (researcher) served as a liason between the reader and the text. The control group received traditional basal reader instruction. Both groups received 30 minutes of instruction each day for four weeks (20 days). Pre- and posttesting was conducted using five measures (Basic Reading Inventory, a retelling task, an inferencing task, the Norris Story Telling Task, and the Test of Written Language-2) and eight dependent variables (comprehension, word recognition, instructional reading level, retelling ability, inferencing ability, story telling ability, overall spontaneous writing ability, and thematic maturity in spontaneous writing). A 2 (time, pretest and posttest) x 2 (group, experimental and control) MANOVA was conducted to determine if there was an interaction effect between time and group. Time was a repeated measure. Follow-up univariate analysis and post hoc analyses were used to examine further effects on each dependent variable. MANOVA results revealed a significant overall main effect for time. Univariate analyses results showed significantly more improvement for the experimental group than for the control group from pre- to posttest on reading comprehension. Although the trends favored the experimental group on all other measures, there was not significantly more improvement from pre- to posttest. Results suggested that CRS may be more effective than traditional basal reader instruction for poor readers with below average language ability on reading comprehension.

Pages

283

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_disstheses.4781

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