Abstract
Many children with different kinds of learning problems struggle with reading. To help them combat their challenges, easy-to-implement interventions are needed. Reading racetracks have proven to be effective tools to increase sight word fluency in students with disabilities. The purpose of this single-case study was to evaluate this technique, for the first time, in a context outside of the United States. Four elementary school children with various learning difficulties received nine to twelve individual intervention sessions from one of two graduate students. The results indicated that reading fluency of 30 common two-syllable German words rose remarkably in all four participants. Even though the treatment was a little less effective for one female student, diagnosed with intellectual/developmental delays, than for the other three students, performance gains were still noteworthy. This study provides further evidence that reading racetracks are an effective practice to build fluency in children with disabilities.
Highlights
Reading is certainly one of the most important skills a child must acquire during the early years of schooling
According to the theory of automatic word processing (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Logan, 1988), word recognition automaticity is indispensable for reading fluency, which in turn is a key foundation for text comprehension (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006; Paige, 2011)
This study examined the effects of a reading racetrack game on the word recognition automaticity of four elementary school students with various special needs
Summary
Reading is certainly one of the most important skills a child must acquire during the early years of schooling. Research indicates that students who read well have a high probability of achieving success in school and later, in the work force (Aaron, Joshi, & Quatroche, 2008; Slavin, Madden, Dolan, Wasik, Ross, & Smith, 1994). By contrast, those who fail to acquire adequate reading skills face an increased likelihood of dropping out (Hernandez, 2011), unemployment (National Research Council and National Academy of Education, 2011), and overall low income (Snyder, de Brey, & Dillow, 2016). To be able to extract meaning from print, one must first acquire the skill of decoding words quickly, accurately, and effortlessly (Lee & Yoon, 2017)
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