Improving Reading Comprehension through an "Interactive Version" of Precision Teaching: Evidence from a Study in a UK Primary School

Abstract

The following study is based on a three months internship in a UK Primary School. A “Reading Project” was carried out during six weeks, with six Year 3 children, aged between 7 and 8 years old. The children were divided into two groups (the control and the experimental group). The study followed a qualitative paradigm, and had two main purposes. The first one was to show that the teaching method called Precision Teaching, normally used in order to increase fluency rate, is also useful in attempt at improving reading comprehension, provided it is delivered as an “Interactive version” (i.e. a combination of flashcards and reading charts, typically used, with activities that aim at understanding and using the words taken into consideration), as it was done with the experimental group. As the study showed, the children who worked with the "Interactive version" of Precision Teaching method, achieved a more consistent improvement in reading comprehension with respect to the children belonging to the control group, who worked with a traditional one-to-one reading support method. The final chapter of the dissertation deals with the second purpose of the study, which was to apply some of the methodologies used in the UK Primary School to teach the children to read, to the Italian context where the English language is not L1 but FL.