Supporting Young Children's Literacy Learning through Home-School Partnerships: The Effectiveness of a Home Repeated-Reading Intervention

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a home repeated-reading intervention on the reading achievement of eight low-performing second-grade children in an urban school by taking into consideration their need to develop automaticity and the role their parents play in this process. Specifically we posed the following questions: Does participation in a home repeated reading intervention improve children's (a) reading accuracy, (b) reading fluency, and (c) reading skills on an independent reading task? When parents participate in a home repeated reading intervention, (a) what word-study strategies do they use to support their children's reading and (b) how do the strategies they use influence children's subsequent word errors? A multiple-baseline across-subjects design and a pre-post design were used to assess the effectiveness of the intervention. Results indicated that all participants made substantially fewer reading errors during the intervention as compared to their performance on baseline stories. All participants demonstrated decreased error rates from the first to the last reading of stories, and significant fluency gains were evident in all cases when comparing mean baseline fluency with mean intervention fluency. All participants made considerable gains in fluency from the first to the last reading of each story, and all children improved on an independent reading measure. All participants read more than 10,000 words during the home intervention. Parents monitored their children's home reading. Four parents provided substantial word-level support, and the children who received this support made fewer repeated reading errors. The children who begin school with full, or nearly full, literacy pocketbooks, in terms of the dominant literacy Discourse, will consistently and inevitably outperform, outlearn, and outscore those children who arrive at the school door with considerably less. While it is the responsibility of the schools to teach what is needed, programs that focus on increasing the level and degree of literacy in the homes of children have begun and are desperately needed. (Purcell-Gates, 1995, pp. 198–199)

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