Comparison of Two Sight Word Instructional Methods on Elementary School Fifth-Grade Students’ English Word Recognition and Reading Comprehension

• Main Authors: HSIAO, WAN-LIN, 蕭琬霖
• Other Authors: CHAN,YU-CHING
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/87604740687901137857

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 兒童英語教育學系碩士班 === 104 === This study aimed to compare two sight word instructional methods, the traditional drill and practice method and the context method, on elementary school fifth-grade students’ English word recognition and reading comprehension. The participants of the study were 51 fifth graders at an elementary school in New Taipei City. Among the 51 fifth graders, 26 students were assigned as the TDP group and received the traditional drill and practice method, while the other 25 students were assigned as the CM group and received the context method. The sight word instruction was conducted two periods per week with 20 minutes per period, lasting eight weeks from mid-March to mid-May in 2016. The research data required for this study were collected through the pre- and posttests of English word recognition and reading comprehension, and further analyzed through independent and paired-sample t-tests. The results of the study showed that students in both groups made great progress in their English word recognition ability. However, the TDP group’s English word recognition ability was improved significantly more than the CM group’s in general, especially in the correspondence of word sound to word form. As for the aspect of English reading comprehension, the CM group significantly enhanced their reading comprehension ability after the context method instruction, while the TDP group did not improve their reading comprehension ability as the CM group did. Moreover, the results indicated that students learned more content words than function words only after the traditional drill and practice method instruction. In addition, both content and function words were learned significantly in the TDP group rather than the CM group. Based on the results, some pedagogical implications and suggestions for further studies were provided.