EFFECTS OF READING ALOUD IN ENGLISH ON THE READING ABILITY AND ATTITUDES OF SPANISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN (HISPANIC, ORAL)

The primary goals of this dissertation is to examine some of the effects of a read aloud program on the attitudes toward reading and the English reading comprehension of Spanish-speaking children in the primary grades. The first chapter provides the historical background of teaching methods in English as a second language. The chapter describes the unsteady relationship between the techniques developed for foreign and/or first language teaching and second language learning. This study poses the question of whether reading aloud, a technique widely used in English monolingual classrooms, can be transferred to the second language classroom where the conceptual, experiential, and linguistic background of the English as a second language learner is so profoundly different from that of the English monolingual learner. The effects of this transference on the second language learner\u27s reading ability and the attitudes toward reading constitute the focus of the study. The second chapter reviews the literature in the areas of reading and bilingualism, reading aloud, and reading attitudes. The review points out two significant findings. First, it reveals that there is very little cogent research available on the topic of reading and bilingualism. Second, the literature available on reading aloud and the measurement of reading attitudes was found to focus almost exclusively on English monolingual learners rather than on second language learners. The third chapter describes the research plan, which follows an experimental design using a control group, pre- and post-testing, and t-test analysis of the responses of fifty-three Spanish-speaking students enrolled in a bilingual elementary program. The tests used were the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, a standardized measure, and an attitude measure adapted by the researcher. A teacher\u27s observation checklist was also used to record students\u27 responses to the readings. The findings of the study presented in Chapter IV a briefly summarized as follows: (1) A positive trend supporting the use of reading aloud in the ESL classroom was observed, although the findings were not statistically significant. (2) Teacher observations indicate that individual reading selections stimulated increased verbal and nonverbal student interaction during the read aloud sessions. Chapter V offers a summary of the study, the conclusions, and the recommendations for applications of the findings, improvement of the study, and possible further research