| While fluent reading is a task that students are expected to master before they leave elementary school, the fact remains that many students continue to struggle with reading fluency well into their middle school years (Rasinski et al., 2005). This mixed methods research was designed with a dual purpose. The first purpose was to examine the reading fluency of seventh grade students in a semi-urban school district in New Jersey before and after they underwent a computerized intervention with talking e-books using the technique of assisted reading that lasted fourteen weeks. The second purpose was to focus on the nature of student interaction with talking e-books and other digital text through qualitative methods including twenty structured, open-ended interviews. The researcher also conducted participant observations, visiting both the control and experimental groups three times each week. During participant observations, the researcher collected field notes, and selected three students from the control group and three students from the experimental group to serve as case studies.;The study included one control group and one experimental group. Each group was comprised of eleven students. The experimental group practiced the assisted reading technique on computers for fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, for the duration of the fourteen week experiment. The control group practiced sustained silent reading for fifteen minutes a day, five days a week during the same time period. The Gray Oral Reading Test 4 (GORT-4) (Pearson, 2011) was administered as a pretest and a posttest. |
