EDLD 5326 SCHOOL COMMUNITY RELATIONS

The title of my Action Research Project is “How Can Technology Increase Fluency.” I haven’t worked very much on my project since my last class but because I am nearing EDLD 5398, I intend to spend more time working on it.  At this time I have completed all except my findings in section 4, my summary, conclusion and recommendations, conclusion, reflections, recommendations, and concluding remarks. When I began this research, I intend to provide evidence that will explain where the breakdown in comprehension occurs so that individuals will understand how to effectively engage the students and ultimately lead them to success through the use of technological tools. This research has been very successful.  When I first began my project, most of my research came from the Standardized TAKS Test but since the test has changed, I get my information from the STAAR Test.  The goal of my study is to determine ways in which struggling readers can attain the skills to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression in order to understand what they’ve read.  A pioneer in literacy research and practice points to evidence that speech recognition technology, which is widely used in telephone call-routing and directory assistance, can be tapped as a cost-effective and technically viable means to advance early childhood literacy, particularly fluency. The ultimate goal of this study is to find ways to aid in the student’s ability to build their phonemic awareness skills, so they can “hear” all of the sounds in words and blend them together to make words (Therrien & Kubina 2006).  With the aid of technology, my research will identify ways to develop fluency in beginning readers thus enabling them to become more automatic at decoding their reading.  As a result, the reader will be able to interpret (decode) the words on the written page easily and make sense or meaning (comprehension) of what is read. These readers are said to have developed fluency in reading.

 Therrien, W. J., & Kubina, Jr., R. M. (2007). The Importance of Context in Repeated

         Reading. Reading Improvement, 44(4), 179-188.