iPod Impact on Oral Reading Fluency of University ESAP students

Abstract

This study aimed to determine whether the use of an iPod-based independent, out- of-class Repeated Reading activity would have an impact on English for Specific Academic  Purposes students’ Oral Reading Fluency (ORF). The research framework included Activity Theory and formative experiment method. Fifteen students worked for six weeks. They used three texts, during two weeks for each one. During the first week of each text, students recorded their first reading using Dropvox. During the second week, they listened to each text, performed by a native speaker, and practised their ORF repeatedly before uploading their recording. Curriculum-Based Measurement / ORF, adapted by Rasinski (2004), was used to measure students’ automaticity (speed and accuracy), and an adapted version of Zutell and Rasinksi’s (1991) Multidimentional Framework to measure prosodic features of fluency. Data analysis revealed that the independent out-of-class use of iPod helped in increasing students’ automaticity and improving their prosodic features of fluency.