A Literacy Exercise: An Extracurricular Reading Program as an Intervention to Enrich Student Reading Habits in Qatar

Ramzi Nasser

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijels.v.1n.1p.61

Abstract

This paper evaluates an extracurricular reading activity in Qatari schools. The paper presents a two-month extracurricular reading program designed for fourth grade students. The methodology used triangulation of the data to analyze, in detail, the students’ primary perceptions towards reading, teacher self-efficacy, teacher instructional behavior and home literacy measures. The program was implemented in four randomly selected schools. The reading program was announced to each school, and students in the four schools were asked whether they wished to enroll contingent upon receiving parental consent. There were 248 students in the treatment group (students enrolled in the English and Arabic reading program), and 176 students were recruited for the control group (not enrolled in the reading program). The main design was a randomized subjects pretest-posttest control group design and analytical split-plot analysis of variance (ANOVA) design. The findings of this study suggested that students in the reading program demonstrated greater interest in reading than those who did not enroll in the reading program, even when factoring out the effects of parents and home environments. The extracurricular program was significant to the extent that it has improved students’ reading habits. An increase in breadth and depth of such programs shall increase language literacy and numeracy in schools and can improve the school culture towards a more student-teacher interactions and engaging activities.

Highlights

Children’s ability to read is of central concern to both society and schools, as reading has been associated with having a general positive effect on children’s academic learning, progress and overall performance (Gorman, 1987)
To assess inter-rater reliability of the observation made through the Classroom Observation Measure (COM) we ran an analysis of variance (ANOVA), a non-significant F(2, 75)=0.14, p=0.87. suggesting the acceptance of the null hypothesis that no difference occurs between the different raters
The findings describe the evolution of reading as an extracurricular program as the teachers had a growing awareness of the development of the reading program and the classroom teaching strategies involved in the activity-based programs

Summary

Introduction

Children’s ability to read is of central concern to both society and schools, as reading has been associated with having a general positive effect on children’s academic learning, progress and overall performance (Gorman, 1987). There are very few studies that explore what reading for pleasure might look like and what the impact of such programs might be on promoting reading in authentic contexts. Reading in such context supports the critical connection between written texts and the community, encouraging interactions with books among school students, teachers and other related stakeholders, including parents and the wider community. IJELS 1 (1):61-71, 2013 skills in different languages (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2006) Such phonological awareness is often driven by such things as fluency in reading and more time spent on reading

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