Relative Effects of Two Previewing Procedures on LD Adolescents' Oral Reading Performance

Abstract

An alternating-treatments design was used to investigate the relative effects of two oral reading previewing procedures: (a) silent: the student reads silently the assigned reading passage prior to reading it aloud, and (b) listening: the teacher reads the assigned selection aloud with the student following along silently prior to the student reading the passage aloud. Five junior-high school learning disabled students, four boys and one girl, participated in the study. In four of five cases results showed that systematic prepractice procedures were related to higher performance levels than was baseline (no prepractice). Differential effects were noted: the listening procedure was related to higher rates of words read correctly than was the silent procedure. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research and instructional procedures, especially as these relate to adolescent learners.