The setting

Shanghai World Foreign Language Primary School—A Professional Development School

Shanghai World Foreign Language Primary School is a G1-5 element school including over 1,000 students in three sections ----the local section, the international section and the PYP section. Our school is famous for its English teaching. The vision of our school is to build a bridge between the school and the world. School is a place for the students to get closer to the world. In this concern, English is no doubt one of the most important parts of our school. The school climate demands a more international modern environment for our students.

In recent years, English reading seems to be more important in students learning area. Many educators work on the project of helping students to read. The teachers in our school have a course book called Kids’ Stories. Many of our teachers find that picture books and stories are quite welcomed learning materials for students. Teachers in our school have gained some strategies of teaching stories. But the story books we used are for intensive reading. It focuses more on learning materials but not on skills. While teaching, we find more of our attention will be focused on the language contents and less focus lies on the reading skills. In a questionnaire from our parents, we also got the information that family could not provide students a large amount of English reading materials. Kids find it is difficult to finish reading long passages with grammar and vocabulary boundaries. Kids learn the language from text books but it doesn’t help them in extensive reading of variety of books. While observing the international section and PYP section, we find foreign teachers use variety books in building students’ reading skills and most of the students in those two sections are encouraged to read big stories and books. That requires teachers in our local section to have a new project named READING FIRST. There is further concerning that we are trying to use the story books in the library to help students in improving their reading skills. It doesn’t have a real curriculum concern, because the books we used for reading won’t be tested in the quiz.

 

The Area of Focus

Reading strategies increase students reading comprehension level

As the school, the teachers and the students recognize the need for improving reading, a group of English teachers gather together to work on the project. We will try to find how students’ reading skills and interest can be aroused from this reading course. It defines an altered curriculum based on skills that will be encountered in the reading course, not what stories are going to be taught.

 

Reviewing the Literature

Studies have shown that, young language learners face significant challenges particularly, where school subjects are taught in English. One of the main challenges is learning to read in the new language. (Cardenas et al., 1988; Thomas and Collier, 1989)  The purpose of our action research is to look for some effective and practical reading strategies in English that stimulate our students’ interest, improve their reading comprehension and help them become readers who can process different contexts independently in the future.

Most kids in our school like reading books at recess. However, as to the elementary school students, they prefer to read story books and picture books which have lots of visual support for their second-language reading. Story-based, reading-focused instruction has been found to help English language learners acquire new vocabulary and improve their reading comprehension (Elley, 1989; 1991; 2000; Elley and Mangubhai, 1983; Elley et al., 1996;Ghosn 2001; 2009). Therefore, our research team just chooses some English original story books or picture books in the library as reading materials in READING FIRRST course.

Based on Fountas and Pinnell’s (1996) extensive experience working with scores of teachers and hundreds of children, they think that the teacher can, through frequent and close observation of children’s reading behavior, develop insight into their reading processes, and, using that information, structure instructional activities to provide young readers the experiences they need to develop as strategic readers. Our research team also wants to figure out what differentiated reading strategies could work on our students.

Some specific reading strategies are recommended by Bergeron and Wolff (2002) which include use of picture cues to construct meaning; chunking words into decodable parts; making predictions; self correcting, summarizing, thinking aloud, monitoring comprehension by asking questions; and making text-to-text, text-to-self and text-to-world connections. We will put most of them into our teaching and think about some other strategies to make our action research more acceptable and practical in the extensive reading course.

 

Creating an Action Plan

Defining the variables

We define that there are varies reading skills employing in reading from our teacher experience. They may help students build their reading ability. Through the Bloom’s taxonomy, we try to fill in the skills into each catalog to meet different level of thinking ability. In that case, we think that students thinking level could be trained and their thinking ability could be stronger. While we are carrying out different skill training, there will be different methods to meet these training. Then there come the various methods and learning style.

 

Practical strategies:

     The students we will choose for this action research come from different grades with different levels. We define that while using the reading methods in helping the students in reading, the struggling students may find a place for them to develop, because the comparison of the improvement is no longer to reach the average level. The comparison will be students themselves.  Their measurable attitudes towards learning could be shown from the pre-project to post-project. This reading course may help the struggling students build their confidence in learning and get interest in reading. For the high level students, there will always be something beyond the course they want to get but fail in the normal classroom. This extensive reading class could provide them the opportunity to improve their thinking ability especially critical and creative thinking. The medium level students are something we may ignore. If the project works well on the average level, which means it can be adopted to a school-wide course. That is the reason we select different level students from each grade to see the common rules from variety.

Research Question

Will employing reading strategies increase students reading comprehension level?

In order to figure out whether different strategies employing could increase students reading comprehension level, we want to know the following:

n      Can students reading speed be developed in the class?

n      Can students get the main ideas from a large amount of information by specific guiding?

n      Can students use interpret and describe ability to express their way of understanding?

n      Do prediction and demonstration encourage students to read and understand more about the contents?

n      Do creative thinking and critical thinking help students improve their reading skills?

n      Will same reading strategies work well in different grade students?

n      Will students’ interest in reading be influenced through the reading course?

Intervention

Our research covers about 150 through 8-11 year-old students in different grades. They are going to have one extensive reading course per week through the next school year. There will be four or five teachers to work on the research work. Two of them are Michelle and Rachel who have been involved in the Action Research Course. We may play a more active role in the action research plan starting from the original ideas. We will also welcome several English teachers into this action research. These teachers will be chosen from their own willingness and interest in this project. Furthermore, these teachers may show their strong needs for professional development.

Membership of the Action Research Group

Four to five English teachers will work on this group by their willingness and self-development demands. They teach from second grade to fifth grade which means they will have a class to carry out their READING FIRST project into practice once or twice a week. Most of time we work individually in the classroom, but the goal setting, the data collection and data making requires all the members in the group to work together. Also we will have workshop or seminar to study some cases and do some reflection on it. This research will cover one school year.

Negotiations to be Undertaken

But before everything starts, we need a talk with our principle to get permission for carrying out our research plan which will cover different grades of students work and different ways of teaching in classes. For the locus of control of an action research, clear explanation and vision of the project should be well shown to our principal. We will also inform the principal the reason why we use a group to work on a project. The project is not only for students’ learning, but also for teachers’ development in professional area. We also need a talk with all my fellow teachers to stimulate their interest in working on this project. It is also useful to show others that what our main working area in this school new term. Even some teachers are not ready for this kind of research; our action can do a sample for providing the evidence. I should make it clear that the project is a two-side-benefit thing to them. One reason is that doing the project can help their professional development, on the other hand, their work can be recorded that may related to their promotion in the near future.

 

Timeline

August ---Search for literature review. Do professional reading in specific area. Make a rough plan for the coming brief introduction for the project. Talk to the principle.

September---Welcome the group members. Get some settings for the project. Do more professional reading. Make the action plan into more details with the group discussion. Make some data collection ideas and put them into real forms. Get a pre-project work in the classroom. Collect some baseline data.

October to January---Develop some specifics in reading strategies. Develop data collection and do classroom experiments. Have group discussion about the reading strategies.

February to May---Implement intervention and collect data. Meet regularly with group members to discuss the efforts of the intervention.

June to July---Collect all the data. Analyze and interpret it and present findings to the faculty during an action research celebration.  Plan the next cycle in the action research process.

Resources

u      Specific literature reading materials for professional area

u      Amounts of English original story books in library

u      Relevant facilities in library

u      Computers to search relevant information and analyze the data

u      Camera and digital recorders

Data Collection Ideas

l        Teacher journal----observation, analysis, reflections

l        Observation data sheets

l        Teacher-made tests/students’ reading comprehension grades

l        Student interview

l        Student survey/Parents survey

l        Student portfolios

l        Video recordings/photographs/maps

l        Likert scales

l        Semantic differential

 

References

Angela, McRae, Allan, Wigfield, Cassandra, S., Corrington, John, T., Guthrie, Pedro, Barbosa, &Susan, Lutz, Klauda. (2009). Impacts of comprehensive reading instruction on diverse outcomes of low-and high-achieving. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(3), 195-214.

Connie, Briggs, & Salli Forbes. (2009). Orientation to a new book: more than a picture walk. The Reading Teacher, 62(8), 706-709.

Darine, Chaaya, & Irma-Kaarina Ghosn. (2010). Supporting young second language learners’ reading through guided reading and strategy instruction in a second grade classroom in Lebannon. Educational Research and Reviews, 5(6), 329-337.

Donna, Sayers, Adomat. (2009). Actively engaging with stories through drama: portraits of two young readers. The Reading Teacher, 62(8), 628-636.

Eithne, Kennedy, &Gerry, Shiel. (2010). Raising literacy levels with collaborative on-site professional development in an urban disadvantaged school. The Reading Teacher, 63(5), 372-383.

Igor, Bajsanski,& Svjetlana Kolic-Vehovec. (2006). Metacognitive strategies and reading comprehension in elementary-school students. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 21(4),  439-451.

Isabel, L., Beck, Margaret, G., Mckeown, & Ronette, G. K., Blake. (2009). Rethinking reading comprehension instruction: A comparison of instruction for strategies and content approaches. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 218-253.

James, S., Kim. (2007). The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention on reading activities and reading achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 505-515.

Jane, Hurry, & Mary, Parker. (2007). Teachers’ use of questioning and modeling comprehension skills in primary classrooms. Educational Review, 59(3), (pp. 299-314).

Jennifer, Jones, Peter, Dewitz, & susan Leahy. (2009). Comprehension strategy instruction in core reading programs. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(2), 102-126.

Mcpherson, Keith. (2007). Teacher-librarians as reading guides. Teacher Librarian, 35(2), 70-73. 

 

Appendix —— Data Collection Samples (Adapted from references above)

Student Survey/ Student Interview:

(   ) 1.   Do you enjoy reading books in your free time?

(   ) 2.   Do you need extra help in reading?

(   ) 3.   Are you a good reader?

(   ) 4.   Can you figure out hard words when reading?

(   ) 5.   Do you like to read new books?

(   ) 6.   Is it hard for you to understand stories you read in class?

(   ) 7.   Do you guess a lot when reading so you can finish quickly?

(   ) 8.   Is reading boring to you?

(   ) 9.   Do you read easier books so you don’t have to work as much?

(   ) 10.   Can you sound out long words?

(   ) 11.   Do you make lots of mistakes in reading?

(   ) 12.   Do you learn more from reading than most students in the class?

(   ) 13.   Are the books you read in class too difficult?

(   ) 14.   How often do you try to find a good book?

(   ) 15.   Do you enjoy the challenge of reading a book?