The effects of Reading Recovery on the English reading development of native Spanish-speaking ESOL student

This study investigated the sustained effects of Reading Recovery on the reading achievement of native Spanish-speaking English Language Learners (ELL) who received the one-to-one intervention while in the first grade. All native Spanish-speaking ELL students who received the Reading Recovery intervention during the three academic years from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2004 were included in the study, including those students who were successful (discontinued), unsuccessful (recommended/exited), or received an incomplete program. Reading achievement data were gathered from end-of-intervention text reading levels in the first grade and from standardized test reading scores from the second and third grades. The technique of "shift analysis" (Lindman, 1968) was used to analyze data for each group of students to explore the degree to which reading achievement was sustained over time. It was found that all student groups showed improvement across time as 84% of the total population had moved out of the bottom quintile with regards to reading achievement by the end of the third grade. Discontinued students showed the highest level of achievement and the incomplete students showed the least growth. This study also examined the correlation between end-of-intervention text reading levels and scores on the standardized tests from the second and third grades. A positive correlation was found for all relationships explored except for one. A negative correlation was found between the text reading level and the NCE scores from the second-grade standardized test for students discontinued from Reading Recovery in the fall. However, of the eight relationships explored, only one correlation was found to be statistically significant (end-of-intervention text reading levels and second-grade standardized test scores for students discontinued in the spring).