Improving Chinese College Students' English Reading Fluency Through Readers' Theatre

Although reading fluency plays a significant role in English learning and teaching, rather scant attention has been given to language learners'fluency development and to the training and using of fluency-improving strategies, especially in ESL/EFL context. Therefore, many problems in terms of English reading fluency have been undiscovered and thus remained unsolved, which hampers learners from developing more comprehensive English reading abilities.The present study combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches with the aim of investigating the general situation of Chinese College students'English reading fluency and particularly finding out factors affecting college students'reading fluency and enhancing their fluency levels by means of conducting relevant fluency training as well.As for the main design of this study, simply speaking, it falls into four parts: firstly, a reading fluency questionnaire covering different aspects of reading fluency has been handed out to 183 freshmen from L2 classes in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in order to get a general perception of college students'problems with reading fluency; secondly, we conduct a pre-test on reading fluency in the experimental class which has 43 students, and in which, Readers'Theater method has been carried out for one semester; and thirdly, a post-test has been conducted on the same 43 students at the end of the semester in order to check their further progress on reading fluency; lastly, 10 students randomly chosen from those who've participated in the training are invited to join a brief interview so as to find out their own perceptions on reading fluency, and attitudes towards Readers'Theatre training.To make the methodologies scientific and to get convincing research findings, several meticulous analyses have been made by using SPSS. On one hand, we make analysis on both internal reliability and construct validity of the questionnaire to cross out those inappropriate items before conducting the questionnaire survey among the four classes of students. On the other hand, referring to the Reading Fluency Scoring Criteria, we make 2-tailed samples t-test to compare results of the pre-test and the post-test, in order to check whether they have made any improvements in reading fluency through the use of Readers'Theater approach. All the data collected in the questionnaire and the tests are analyzed by SPSS 17.0.In brief, by analyzing the questionnaire, mainly 3 factors have been found to have quite a great impact on students'reading fluency, which are reading proficiency, reading prosody and reading strategies application. Moreover, research findings reflected from tests show that most of the college students in this study do not have big problems in aspects of accuracy of word decoding, and they generally have moderately good demand of reading proficiency, but many of them still need to enhance their automaticity in word decoding. And poor reading prosody is the biggest obstacle that hinders their reading fluency. However, we are delighted to find Readers'Theater approach has a positive influence on their reading fluency improvement both in terms of reading automaticity and reading prosody.Therefore, we call for more emphasis to be put on reading fluency training in both theoretic and empirical researches in China. In order to enhance reading fluency of Chinese students, it is suggested that systematic reading fluency training, Readers'Theater, for instance, should be adopted in English classrooms.