0WAYS OF IMPROVING READING SKILLS
Shahzoda Sherzodbek kizi Odiljonova
Student, Chirchik state pedagogical university mannobovadilafruzxon@gmail .com Scientific adviser: Abduvaliyevna Kamiljonova Mavluda Teacher, Chirchik state pedagogical university mavlyudadjurayeva1 @gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Researchers have found that teaching reading strategies is a key element in developing student comprehension. However, many teachers lack a solid foundation for teaching these reading comprehension strategies. Therefore, teachers need to be prepared on how to design effective comprehension strategies and how to teach these strategies to their students. Therefore this study aims to study the effective reading strategies in order to improve reading skills in language classes. The study is an action research applied to a number of 14 students in an intermediate level integrated skills course. The main question of the study is "Would reading strategies help my students' reading comprehension studies?" The results of the study indicate that the students had an improvement to a great extend have been tutored about the reading strategies.
Keywords: reading comprehension, strategies, 3D Readers, CACSR, inference
skills
INTRODUCTION
Reading comprehension is a fundamental cognitive ability for children, that supports school achievement and successively participation in most areas of adult life. Therefore, children with learning disabilities (LD) and special educational needs who show difficulties in text comprehension, sometimes also in association with other problems, may have an increased risk of life and school failure. Although most of the literature deals with typical development, also cases of students with learning difficulties were considered. For example, Potocki et al. (2013) (see also Potocki et al., 2015) examined the effects of two different computerized programs with specific aims: one focusing on comprehension features, such as inference making and the analysis of text structure, the other considering decoding skills. Both training programs brought some benefits to reading comprehension, however larger effects were found with the program focused on comprehension with long-lasting effects in
307
April 23-24, 2024 International Scientific and Practical Conference
Chirchik State Pedagogical University Current Issues of Modern Philology and Linguodidactics
Staatliche Pädagogische Universität Chirchik Aktuelle Fragen der modernen Philologie und Linguodidaktik
^hjrchiqdavlat^edagGgika^niversiteti^^^^^^^Za
listening and reading comprehension (see also Kleinsz et al., 2017). Studies by Johnson-Glenberg (2005) and Kim et al. (2006), using respectively the programs 3D Readers and CACSR, were able to promote reading comprehension abilities in middle school students through metacognitive activities. Thanks to these programs students also became more aware of reading strategies and implemented them more successfully during text comprehension. In particular, a study by Niedo et al. (2014), obtained positive results on silent reading in a small group of children struggling with reading using the "cloze" procedure. This procedure proposes exercises in which parts of a text, typically words, are missing and participants are required to complete the text guessing what is missing.y have an increased risk of life and school failure.
Thus, computerized programs generally seem to improve reading comprehension skills. However, it should be noticed that, in most cases, students were trained at school, without the personalized support of a clinician taking into consideration the cognitive and psychological needs of the child. In particular, to our knowledge, no program examined the effects of an internet-based distance reading comprehension program which allows the child to be trained at home in a personalized way. A useful aspect of an internet-based distance training is that the psychologist can monitor with the application (app) the child's results and activities and write him/her some motivational messages, reducing the attritions present in programs carried out at home with the only supervision of parents. Literature concerning distance trainings is still rare, however, some evidence suggests that these programs may represent a good integration to other types of intervention, usually carried out at school, in a rehabilitation center or at home (e.g., Mich et al., 2013). Therefore, despite still preliminary, we think that it is relevant to present data about a distance program developed in Italy named Cloze (Cornoldi and Bertolo, 2013), devised for rehabilitation purposes but with potential implication also for educational contexts. Cloze has been developed to promote inferential abilities both at a sentence-and discourse-level using the "cloze" procedure. Several findings in the literature demonstrate that abilities, such as anticipating text parts and inference making, bring improvements in text comprehension (e.g., Yuill and Oakhill, 1988) and it has been shown that one way to promote inferential competences is to improve the ability to predict parts of the text that are missing or that follow, considering the available information: the "cloze" technique appears to be one of the most successful ways for this purpose (e.g., Greene, 2001).
In the current study the effectiveness of this training program has been tested on a clinical population who exhibited, for various reasons, difficulties in reading comprehension. Participants were 28 children (16 male and 12 female) attending a
April 23-24, 2024
308
private practice for learning difficulties in the city of La Spezia, in the north-west of Italy, from 3rd to 6th school grade (5 of 3rd, 9 of 4th, 11 of 5th and 3 of 6th grade), with a mean age of children of M = 9.79 years (SD = 1.03). Seventeen children had a current or past speech disorder: of these children 10 also had a LD (Learning Disabilities) and one was bilingual (speech problems were not due to bilingualism). The other 11 children had a LD or important learning difficulties, and one of them had also ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). For the goals of the study, all these children were considered together as they all presented a severe reading comprehension difficulty as reported by parents and teachers and confirmed by the initial assessment. All children had received a comprehensive psychological assessment (see Table 2), adapted to their particular needs and ages. In particular all children had an IQ >80 assessed with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003) and did not have anxiety disorders, mood affective disorders or other developmental disorders, with the exception of the cases with language disorder and the case with ADHD. Children were not receiving any additional treatment, including medication. Written consent was obtained from the children's parents in the context of the private practice. MATERIALS AND METHODS
Pre-/Post-test Assessment and Procedure of the Training Each child started a training program through the distance rehabilitation platform Ridinet, using the Cloze app, after the assessment of learning and cognitive abilities, including comprehension assessment with two texts, one narrative and one informative (Cornoldi and Carretti, 2016; Cornoldi et al., 2017). Connection to the Ridinet web site was required in order to access to the app, three or four times a week for more or less 15/20 min. The period of use was of 3 months for 6 children and 4 months for 22 children. After this period children's comprehension was assessed again. Additionally, some questions were asked to parents and children about the app's utility and pleasantness. In particular, children were asked: "Do you think the program helped you improve your text comprehension skills?," "Did you like doing this program instead of the same exercises on paper?"; and parents were asked: "Was it difficult to start the Cloze activities on days when it had to be done?," "Compared to the beginning of the treatment, how do you currently judge the ability of your child to understand the texts?". For all questions, except the last one, the answer had to be given on a 5-point scale with 1 = not at all, 2 = a little, 3 = enough, 4 = very, 5 = very much. For the last question the answer changed on a 4-point scale with 1 = got worse, 2 = unchanged, 3 = slightly improved, and 4 = greatly improved. Comprehension Tasks
April 23-24, 2024
309
Reading comprehension was assessed with two texts, the first narrative and the other informative, taken from Italian batteries for the assessment of reading (Cornoldi and Carretti, 2016; Cornoldi et al., 2017). The texts range between 226 and 455 words in length, and their length increases with school grade (in order to have texts and questions matching the degrees of expertise at different grades the batteries include a different pair of texts for each grade). Students read the text in silence at their own pace, then answer a variable number of multiple-choice questions (depending on school grade), choosing one of four possible answers. There is no time limit, and students can reread the text whenever they wish. The final score is calculated as the total number of correct answers for each text. Alpha coefficients, as reported by the manuals, range between 0.61 and 0.83. For the purposes of the study we decided to use the same two comprehension texts, at pre-test and post-test, as the procedure offered the opportunity of directly examining and showing to parents changes in comprehension and previous evidence had shown the absence of relevant retest effects with this material in a retest carried out after 3 months (Viola and Carretti, 2019).
Distance Rehabilitation Program: Cloze
Cloze (Cornoldi and Bertolo, 2013) is an app for the promotion of text comprehension with the specific aim to recover processes of lexical and semantic inference. At each work session the child works with texts that lack words and must complete the empty spaces by choosing the correct alternative from those automatically proposed by the app, so that the text becomes congruent. The program is adaptive, as text complexity and proportion of missing words vary according to the previous level of response, and is designed for children who have weaknesses in written text comprehension, mainly due to poor skills in lexical and semantic inferential processes. The app also allows to enhance a set of language skills (phonology, syntax, semantics) which contribute to ensuring the fluidity of text and production processing. The recommended age range for the use of this program is between 7 and 14 years. In this study the semantic mode (only content words may be missing and no syntactic cues can be used for deciding between the alternatives) was proposed to 21 children and the syntactic mode (where all words may be missing) to 7 children. The mode type selected for each child depends from the performance at pre-test and diagnosis. A clinician, co-author of the present study (LB), monitored the child's results and activities with the app and sent him/her from time to time some motivational messages. The motivational messages were typically sent once a week for congratulating with children for the work done and check with him/her possible problems emerged. Training lasted from 3 to 4 months and involved between 3 and 4
April 23-24, 2024
310
sessions of 15-20 min per week. The variation in duration depended on the decision of each individual family. In fact, children were required to use the software for about 4 months or in any case for a minimum period of 3 months (choice made by six families).
CONCLUSION
The present study examined the effects of the use of Cloze, a distance rehabilitation program focused on inference skills, for improving reading comprehension, on the basis of the hypothesis that, being inference making related to reading comprehension at different ages, positive effects of the training activities on reading comprehension should be found.
REFERENCES
1. Beck, I. L., Perfetti, C. A., and McKeown, M. G. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. J. Educ. Psychol. 74, 506-521. doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.74.4.506
2. Channa, M. A., Nordin, Z. S., Siming, I. A., Chandio, A. A., and Koondher, M. A. (2015). Developing reading comprehension through metacognitive strategies: a review of previous studies. Eng. Lang. Teach. 8, 181-186. doi: 10.5539/elt.v8n8p181
3. Chen, H. (2009). Online reading comprehension strategies among fifth- and sixth-grade general and special education students. Educ. Res. Perspect. 37, 79-109.
4. Cornoldi, C., and Bertolo, L. (2013). Cloze Ridinet. Bologna: Anastasis.
5. Cornoldi, C., and Carretti, B. (2016). Prove MT-3-Clinica. Firenze: Giunti Edu.
6. Cornoldi, C., Carretti, B., and Colpo, C. (2017). Prove MT-Kit Scuola. Dalla valutazione degli Apprendimenti di Lettura E Comprensione Al Potenziamento. [MT-Kit for the Assessment In The School. From Reading Assessment To Its Enhancement]. Firenze: Giunti Edu.
7. Komiljonova M. A. et al. Content and language integrated learning (clil) method and how it is changing the foreign language learning landscape //o'zbekistonda fanlararo innovatsiyalar va ilmiy tadqiqotlar jurnali. - 2024. - T. 2. - №. 26. - C. 2633.
8. Djurayeva, M. A. (2023). Developing note-taking skills in consecutive interpreting. Academic Research in Educational Sciences, 4(4), 232-236.
9. Djurayeva M. Delving into note-taking technique in consecutive interpreting //Models and methods in modern science. - 2022. - T. 1. - №. 17. - C. 43-49.
311
April 23-24, 2024 International Scientific and Practical Conference
