A Study Of The Effects Of Repeated Reading On Chinese Senior High School Students’ Reading Fluency And Comprehension

Reading, as an important means of foreign language input, has always been emphasized in language teaching and learning. Nonetheless, FL learners don’t read much. It underscores a significant obstacle that FL learners lack in reading fluency which refers to reading rapidly and automatically without degrading comprehension. Therefore, one of the most important aims of teaching reading is to foster students’ reading fluency.Cumulative evidence has demonstrated that repeated reading is one promising method of fluency-building used in L1 settings, and seems successful in increasing learners’ reading comprehension. However, relatively less attention has been focused on reading fluency in FL settings. Recent studies in this area had on a small sample of university students as subjects and adopted segment passages from stories as treatment passages. Based on the results of these studies, it’s suggested that reading fluency development is significantly necessary during the process of English reading instruction and repeated reading seems to have positive effects on developing learners’ reading fluency in FL settings. However, it remains inconclusive whether repeated reading with different treatment passages and procedures has positive effects on Chinese senior high school students’ English reading fluency and comprehension improvement in domestic research.With recent calls for attention to reading in National English Curriculum for High Schools and urgent needs to change the present situation of time-consuming but less-efficient English reading instruction in Chinese senior high schools, this study focuses on a theory-based reading fluency program called repeated reading to answer the following 3 questions: 1). Do the students gain improvement in terms of reading fluency after repeated reading treatment? If yes, could the improvement transfer to new, unpracticed passages? 2). Do the students gain improvement in terms of reading comprehension after repeated reading treatment? If yes, could the improvement transfer to new, unpracticed passages? 3). What factors might influence the effects of repeated reading on reading fluency and comprehension?Two classes(one as the experimental group and the other as the control group) from a Chinese senior high school were engaged in the moderate-intensity 14-week repeated reading treatment. In the 1st and 14 th week, the two groups attended the pre- and post-test. From the 2nd to the 13 th week, the experimental group were required to read one treatment passage chosen from Oxford senior high school English textbook every week. They read each treatment passage 5 times silently with recording support and then answered comprehension questions attached to passages after the 1st and 5th reading. Finally, they were investigated by questionnaire at the end of the experiment to probe into factors that might influence the effects of repeated reading. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of results show that repeated reading has a facilitative effect on the students’ reading fluency and comprehension improvement and that the improvement can be transferred to new, unpracticed passages. In addition, a number of factors that appear to influence the effects of repeated reading are identified as learners’ positive attitudes to repeated reading, appropriate repeated reading materials, and suitable repeated reading model.Based on the results, some pedagogical implications are purposed that an applicable repeated reading model(5 times re-reading, timing reading, reading while listening, and teachers’ intervention) provided in this study together with some guidance for selecting repeated reading treatment materials to follow(at appropriate difficulty level and length, in various topics and styles, each treatment passage independent from the others) could be employed to change teachers’ previous programmed English reading instruction and that an understanding of application of repeated reading to develop reading fluency and comprehension will be conducive to helping students get rid of their bad habit of reading word by word and thus improve the situation of reading slowly but comprehending less.