The Effects of Nursery Rhymes on Improving Reading Fluency of Fourth-Grade Primary School Students

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the effect of nursery rhymes, which are entertaining and remarkable products of Turkish folk literature, on the development of the fluent reading skills of fourth grade primary school students. The study group consisted of 44 students studying in the fourth grade during the 2015-2016 academic year at a public primary school in the Vakfıkebir county of the Trabzon province in Turkey. Since the activities conducted with the experimental group were applied by the researcher, the section of the researcher was chosen as the experimental group and one of the remaining fourth-grade sections were randomly assigned as the control group. In the study, the texts, which were determined in order to assess the fluent reading skills of the students, were firstly read by the students prior to the study and their voices were recorded. The reading rates of the students were evaluated using the recordings by counting how many words the students read in one minute, their reading levels were determined with Error Analysis Inventory and prosodic features were evaluated with the Prosodic Reading Scale. Then, activities involving nursery rhymes were applied to the experimental group for 15 weeks as 2 activities per week, while the students in the control group continued their regular education. After the activities were applied, the measurements that were carried out prior to the study were repeated by making students read the same texts again. The reading rate scores, accurate reading scores and the data obtained from the Prosodic Reading Scale at the end of the measurements were transferred into an SPSS package program. The data were analyzed by performing paired samples T-Test and Independent Groups T-Test analyses. At the end of the study, it was determined that the reading rates and accurate reading skills of the students in the experimental group improved.