Effects of Oral Fluency Package on Reading Achievements of Pupils in Rural Primary Schools in Ondo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Depressed levels of reading performance in English which is the language of literacy in the lower primary schools appeared noticeable among the children of rural migrant farmers in Ondo State. It is against this background that this study examined the effects of oral fluency package on pupils' achievement in reading. The study adopted the quasi-experimental design of non-random sampling. Population consisted of all non-Yoruba-speaking rural primary four pupils of Ondo State. Sixty subjects in intact classes of 30 pupils from two rural primary schools purposively selected made up the sample size. Two research questions and one hypothesis were tested in the study. Data were collected through the use of validated instruments tagged Oral Reading Fluency Scale (ORFS) and the Multi-Dimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS) with reliability coefficients of 0.68 and 0.65 respectively. Descriptive statistics such as mean, media and standard deviation were used to analyze the research questions while ANCOVA was used to test the hypothesis collected at 0.05 level of significance. The study found out that fluency intervention, using the Scientifically Based Reading Research (SBRR) approach, significantly increased the reading rates of the struggling readers in the experimental group in the L2 (F-cal = 5.81 > F-val .000, p < 0. 05).