CLASSROOM RESEARCH

PROJECT (CRP)

Al-Quds University
Master of Arts in Teaching Program (MA(

Spring 2020
Mohammed Wahdan
Supervisor: Dr. Rana Surakhi
Reading-oriented Educational Games to
Overcome Delayed Reading Fluency
For 5th graders

I
 Disclaimer

I declare that this research has been composed solely by me and that it has not been submitted,
in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Except where states otherwise by
reference or acknowledgment, the work presented is entirely my own.

Name: Mohammed Wahdan

Signature: ______________

Date: ___ / ___ /2020

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 Acknowledgement

This research comes as a written framework for the fulfillment of the course entitled
“Classroom Research Project I / 9207597” which is a prerequisite for the course “Classroom
Research Project II”. And these courses are obligatory courses to obtain the Master of Arts in
Teaching (MAT) at Bard Collage / Al Quds University.

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 Table of contents
No. Title Page No.
I Abstract 1
II Introduction 2
Chapter one 4
1.
The story behind my classroom research project
1.1 Stories and anecdotes taken from my notes, reflections and data. 5
1.2 The context of my research 7
1.3 Description of the learning challenge in my classroom 7
1.4 Who are my students? 8
1.5 Myself as a teacher-researcher 9
1.6 The discipline I teach 9
1.7 Why Does My Project Matter? 11
1.8 My critical questions 12
Chapter Two
2. 13
What I’ve learned from other scholars and colleagues
2.1 Theoretical foundation of my action 14
2.2 The literature surrounding my critical question 15
Chapter Three 19
3.
An inside view of my research process: a roadmap of my journey
3.1 Research questions 20
3.2 Research design and my strategy 20
3.3 Action plan 23
3.4 Data collection tools 27
Chapter Four
4. 29
What I have learned as related to my intervention: my story in the field
Chapter Five
5. 32
Bringing it together: a discussion of the major finding of my research
Chapter Six
6. 43
Further reflection on my journey
7. References 46
8. Appendices 48

IV
 I. Abstract

This research project is an ambitious scheme to dissect in some detail and to put and
implement an appropriate remedial strategy/s to an educational dilemma facing young
English language learners. In specific stage through their academic progress, some students
face reading fluency problem. Special concern is given in this research to those students who
are moving up from 4th grade to 5th grade. First, a description for the dilemma is given along
with definitions for other variables which are strongly related to the subject matter. Then, a
theoretical frame is woven to finally reach that shape of an executive accumulative teaching
plan that meant to resolve that learning deficit. At the end, a description for the plan
implementation through classes and reflections and conclusions are brought to the reader.

Keywords: reading, fluency, teaching, implementation, plan, 5th grade

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 I. Introduction

One of the ultimate goals of teaching a language is to reach a stage with the learners
where they can read fluently. The learners can be achieving this by being extensively
exposed, through their different level of education, to many systematic methods, strategies
and techniques which insure arriving at that stage.
Reading, like the other language skills, contributes to the accumulation of all language
skills to build an appropriate and satisfying language learning outcomes that tend to be
reveled in different activities and performance in variant contexts.

"If you don't ride a bike fast enough, you fall off."

Teaching how to read goes in different steps beginning with introducing the alphabets
and sounds, then how to decode a word, reading longer combined words, reading a sentence
and up to reading a paragraph or a text. The best way to understand the stages of reading
development is to infer them to Bloom's Taxonomy.1 And for reading is not just decoding,
the learner reaches fluent reading when he/she trained and can read also with appropriate
intonation, smoothness and adding expression.
"Fluency may be defined as “reasonably accurate reading, at an
appropriate rate, with suitable expression, that leads to accurate and
deep comprehension and motivation to read" 2

But unfortunately, some students cannot cope up with the expected degree of reading
development on account of different personal and interpersonal learning difficulties. The
main focus of this research is one of these reading difficulties that stand on the way of the
learners' reading fluency development.
Gradual complexity of the reading activities is common and logical as they progress in
their education. The reading texts in the pupils' textbooks have to match with their actual and
expected capacities in reading or to have a minor added complexity margin meant to elevate

1 Bloom's Taxonomy: is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into
levels of complexity and specificity. The cognitive model in the taxonomy has been the primary focus of most
traditional education and is frequently used to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments and
activities.
2
(Hasbrouck & Glaser, 2012, p. 13)

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the learner's skills and competence in reading in a way that suits their reasonable growing
learning capabilities.
I believe the learning difficulty that I am exploring in this research is resulted by an
external inferior factor which is the curriculum itself. In the research I argued that the
curriculum hadn’t take in consideration the current learning and the targeted future learning
of the students. We've been taught as teachers that the coming learning is not to be too
complex or difficult away from the learner's present learning or understanding. According to
Vygotsky's theory of scaffolding learning, the next learning is to be prepared to meet with the
learner's Zone of Proximal Development, if not, the resulted gap in the learner's learning and
understanding will negatively impact the student progress in the directed skill and his/her
overall development in other dependent learning and skills.

This gradual requirement hadn’t been met, I believe, in and between the English
language curriculum for 4th and 5th grade in the public schools. There is a sever upgrade for
the reading amount and complexity when a student is moving up to 5th grade. This dilemma
has negatively affected the students' reading fluency as well other aspects of the reading skill.
More elaboration on this matter will be in chapter one.

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 1. Chapter One
The Story Behind My Classroom Research Project (CRP)

This chapter includes a detailed description of the dilemma in student learning which is
delayed reading fluency for 5th graders. The description of the learning challenge is based on
my professional knowledge and personal experience, as well as observations made on student
learning in the classroom.

The purpose of this section is to enable the reader to experience the moments or the
incidents that made me see what was happening in my classroom as a learning challenge. I
included evidence drawn from my classroom practices which indicate the difficulty in
students’ learning. Furthermore, I explained how I started to think differently about
overcoming this learning challenge.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide enough background about the context of my
research. This will go through describing the learning challenge, defining my students,
defining myself as a teacher, the discipline I teach, and last but not least explaining why does
my project matters?.

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 1.1 Stories and Anecdotes Taken from My Notes, Reflections and Data

At the start of this school year 2019/2020, I began teaching grade 5 and from the first class
I realized that we are facing a learning difficulty / problem. My 5th graders are the same
students whom I taught in grade 4. And the issue is like this:

 As 4th graders, pupils were exposed to small readings in the text book. Those
readings were no longer than short replies in brief conversations or not even full
sentences. (see appendices samples 1 and 2)
 Now in 5th grade, students are asked to read longer forms as full conversations
and paragraphs. They are apparently not familiar with such reading amount. (see
appendices samples 3 and 4)
 The students were shocked by the reading amount and this affected their reading
fluency and speed.

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Figure 1: Samples from 4th and 5th grade textbooks

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 1.2 The Context of My Research

I teach in two schools, one of them is a small school located in a village where most the
students are relatives who come from one or two families only. There aren’t many students in
this school and the classes are not crowded. The students live in a Beduin community, in
harsh lifestyle and different governing cultural concept and somehow this has affected there
learning progress in all disciplines and at all levels since the students are not studying at
home and tend to help their parents all the time with different kinds of work, and it appears
that not much value is given to education in this community. All the time me and the other
teachers give homework and returned not done, so we took and take in consideration that if
we want any learning to happen, this will be while they are at school and not to rely on
homework or self-study.

1.3 Description of The Learning Challenge in My Classroom

Now my students are encountering longer and more complex forms of reading texts
which they are not familiar from their previous learning in length and complexity. These long
readings from their prospective have affected the overall reading skill, but most importantly
for me is reading fluency. As young learners, of course I need them to be competent in other
aspects of the reading skill; comprehension, pronunciation, intonation, stress …etc, but I
chose that I want them first to improve their reading fluency in this stage since I believe that
other aspects of the reading skills will be learnt and built gradually through their progress.

I noticed that my students are producing the following attitude and behavior before or while
reading:

- Before reading:

 They will verbally complain about the length of the reading text even before starting
to read.
 It doesn’t matter for them if the content words are easy or difficult to read, they are
shocked about the amount of the reading task.

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 - While reading:

 They do unnecessary stops after two or three words and I think that they inherited
this from their 4th grade curriculum readings.
 They are not familiar with reading sub-skills which gives the text the desired way
of reading that assists the meaning; intonation, stops, word stress …. etc.
 Sometimes they are lost between lines for they were asked to read less than one
line before.

I think that I need my students to read fluently as a beginning or a spark to

initiate other reading related skills. For the sake of improving my students reading
speed and fluency, I think that the text book reading tasks are not enough to
overcome this learning challenge. I believe that I need more materials; other
sources, tools, methods and other strategies than the current in use ones.

1.4 Who Are My Students?

My students are both girls and boys, they are average healthy children. They are very
active and motivated to learning challenges. Competition exists specially between boys and
girls for executing tasks and gaining better marks.

As today’s generation they are interested in technology and technology products such as
mobiles, tablets and video games. They like new knowledge when presented, and I've noticed
that they like geographical information and stories as well.

My students come from the surrounding local community which is a wholly Beduin
community. All of them are somehow relatives. This community showed no interest or value
given to education. No matter the parents will say about their encouragement to their kids to
learn and study, in fact, students will come to school without studying, doing homework or
even keep their school things clean and tidy. Students, as they say, will be involved with
different works at home. Boys will attend the goats and sheep and girls helping their mothers
with the different housework, younger siblings and babies. Still the students are motivated
overall; and the main source of this motivation is that they consider school hours as a relief
from that huge amount of work they are obliged to do at home.

As a matter of fact most of the teachers at school and I, dealing with this situation, we
will prefer to do all the work in class and few homework is given to the students.

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 1.5 Myself as A Teacher-Researcher

My personal educational philosophy is formulated around and between the following points:

1. The teaching-learning process must be learners-centered, taking care of the learner’s

motivation, expectation, intelligences, intuitional knowledge.

2. I think I’ll reach active learning when students are aware of their potentials, skills and
thinking (how their minds work).

3. I always instruct pupils about thinking about their own learning. Explicit instruction to
teach learners how to organize and regulate their thinking

4. Recording of various kinds is of vast importance, so the teacher can observe and adjust
with some degree their thinking to reach a desired mutual understanding of the problem and
how we can solve it.

5. Learning and knowledge is of no value if the learners cannot transfer it internally or into
another situation, so I think it’s of great importance to vary materials, learning settings and
situations to leave the stage for authentic learning to take place and learners to have their
space.

1.6 The Discipline I Teach

I am teaching English language for 5th, 6th and 8th grades this year. I had taught
different stages of learners in the past, from 1st graders up to 11th grade.

Teaching English as a second language is one of the most psychologically satisfying

careers you could have when you can see the effects of your teaching practice on the progress
of your learners. It’s an opportunity to exercise your teaching skills and transfer all useful
things you had experienced and acquired to those young learners. As with any teaching job,
teaching English is not without its challenges.

And here is a list of what I think that the most challenging things for me as a teacher:

1. Creating and maintaining motivation:

I think that keeping the learners motivated all the time is not an easy job. I won't
discuss the motivation as a subject here. In my classes, I am trying to maintain that needed
motivation in my students and I am doing this by changing in my methods, strategies, ways
and tools of teaching. Between many things; I use audio visual aids a lot, I always reward the

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right answers and good behavior, I employ competition in an appropriate way and I use many
educational games in my teaching.

I believe that maintaining that motivation within the students is becoming a harder
task when learners are getting older. This is what I am facing with my 5th graders, but still I
am managing to keep them up interested and I am doing more effort with 8th graders.

2. The curriculum:

I will not criticize the curriculum for now, for this will not serve my research ultimate
goals. But here are some notes about the curriculum which I think have their connection with
my research project dilemma:

 It’s late to begin with alphabets in the second semester with 1st graders.
 Pupils will not finish alphabets until the end of the second grade, so I think that two
years of the learner's time is wasted with alphabets.
 So it's in the 3rd grade when students will began to spell letters together to initiate the
simplest kind of reading.
 A lot of tasks of listening and a few tasks of speaking. So learners are soaking through
listening more than what they are supposed to produce. And I think the way back is
better, since I think speaking is that desired overall skill to produce as an outcome for
the teaching-learning process.

So I think that the curriculum is underestimating the learner's potentials. In private

schools for example, pupils start with alphabets first thing as 1st graders or even before that in
the kindergartens and this is affecting the scale of comparison between governmental and
private schools when looking to other skills as will. Actually, I think that one of the reasons
of why our students (in governmental schools) are struggling with reading fluency is that
much time is consumed in their crucial early stages in teaching them alphabets and this limits
their engagement in other skills which depends on reading.

3. Keep up with new innovations in the field of teaching:

I personally always work on enhancing my knowledge in the field of education and its
new developments and my study in the MAT is an example. I always attend these courses
held and organized by the education department and Ministry of Education.

4. Lack of resources:

We have a dedicated website for McMillan curriculum (the public schools

curriculum), which contains teaching aids and kits; the text book, teacher's book, audios,
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posters and flashcards. But in some situation I feel that I need more teaching aids to serve
enhancing the learning process and the learning outcome, these teaching aids that I mean
maybe simple or complex and datable to the learning goal. I tend to build and use such aids
with my students all the time, these can include building models, cut outs, wall boards and
even cooking recipes. I find these teaching aids quite useful and helpful, creating a motivated
atmosphere and learning engaging situations.

5. Lack of authentic and situational contexts:

My students are not involved at all with authentic situations where they are obliged to
use English language. Even Jericho is a tourist city with a big chance to run across foreign
tourists, but my students come from a closed isolated community living on Jericho rural side
areas away from the city's crowding.

1.7 Why Does My Project Matter?

I consider my project of distinctive importance for the following reasons:

1. this dilemma has been discussed for a long time in the educational scenes between
public schools educators; teachers and supervisors. And they all approved the existence
of the problem.
2. I think it's of my basic duties as a teacher to help my student overcome a learning
challenge they may face on the run of their learning.
3. As an English teacher, I believe that I can't proceed in teaching new and upcoming skill
or knowledge before building a solid foundation of the developing understanding and
skills in the minds of learners. And this is to be done in a way of scaffolding which
ensures stabilizing previous knowledge, skill and understanding in convenience and
appropriate amount and quality before introducing the new learning. In the case of
teaching English there will be an additional importance for this notion by realizing that
the language is mixture of the four interwoven and collaborated; listening, speaking,
writing and reading, so if there is a deficit in teaching and learning one of these skills I
think the other skills will be affected and the overall progress as well.
4. My research will be available for teachers who may benefits from it to overcome
reading fluency problems.

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 1.8 My Critical Questions
The main aim of this study is to find whether using reading-oriented educational games
will help 5th graders in my school to develop their fluency in reading. So the main
questions that this study will explore:

1.8.1 Main research question:

How will reading-oriented educational games help 5th graders overcome their delayed
reading fluency?

1.8.2 Sub research questions

1. How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' reading speed?
2. How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' pronunciation?
3. How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' comprehension?
4. How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' other reading related
skills such as decoding, sentence structure and cohesion, intonation, expression …
etc.?
5. How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' engagement, attitude and
enthusiasm to read?

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2. Chapter Two
What I’ve learned from other scholars and colleagues

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce what I have learned from reading about the
literature that revolves around my critical question. The main arguments that I established
and wanted to find related literature to it is if using reading-oriented educational games will
help my students overcome their delayed reading fluency. Also I searched to find the
credibility of using sight words as the content of these educational games.
I also searched for any concepts, theories, models and ideas that exist in relation to
my main critical question. Later in this section I listed some selected books, researches,
articles and papers that have some links with my research subject and methodology.

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2.1 Theoretical foundation of my action

Educational games:
Using educational games in the classroom is not a new trend. Teachers for decades
have been using educational games for assisting the curriculum in ways that engage
students in the learning. Some will argue about educational games being challengeable and
time consuming; still they proved to manifest students' interaction, collaboration, desired
competition, motivation and encouragement. This has been proved by many researches so
far and researched continue to praise the positive effects of using educational games in the
classrooms.

Game-Based Learning (GBL) can be successfully used to improve both learning

and teaching. It simply means including games in your instruction. One of the greatest
challenges for educator is with-success teaching giant groups of students, all of whom
having totally different personalities, different capabilities and different learning
preferences. With high expectations of everything students wish variety of activities,
rewards, surprises and humor to stay up their interest in learning. Finding new ways to
grab the attention of learners and engaging them in the learning process is one of the main
issues nowadays. Learning is not just rote memorization. Students won’t be able to gain
any information and skills out of dull learning process but they understand the application
of skills and knowledge to solve real-life problems with help of effective learning process.
The knowledge and skills acquired through game-based learning are retained longer than
information from other learning methods. Aarti (2018).

Why do games work? Games are enjoyable and interactive and learners respond
naturally to this type of learning dynamic. If learning is to occur, students must be
motivated to learn (Calahoun, 1980)

Sight words:
Sight words build speed and fluency when reading. Accuracy, speed, and fluency
in reading increase reading comprehension. The sight words are a collection of words that
a student learns to recognize without sounding out the letters. The sight words are both
common, frequently used words and foundational words that a student can use to build a
vocabulary. Combining sight words with phonics instruction increases a child’s speed and
fluency in reading.

Few studies have taken sight words as their main subjects, so it was the difficult
for me to frame out the related researches and theories about sight words. George H.

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 McNinch (1981) suggested some strategies for teaching sight words to disabled readers
and McArthur and Castles (2015) added to these strategies

2.2 The literature surrounding my critical question

Here is a selection of the articles, researches and books that I found them the most useful for
my research:

- Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of reading development.‫‏‬

Even if it's a short article, but it contains a chart showing the stages of reading
development up to six stages beginning with stage zero and ending with stage 5. What is
important about this article for this research is that it gives the reader an idea how the
reading skill is developing in young learners who are the subject of the study. Another
thing that this article stating clearly that one of the stages is the fluency stage where
learners acquire fluency by direct instructions and vocabulary activities. The article says
that children go through the fluency development stage at an age around 7-8 but this is
for mother tongue.

Table 1: Chall's Stages of Reading Development

And according to these stages, my students are supposed to be in stage 3 where they can read
with fluency.

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- Torleiv Hoien & Ingvar Lundberg (1988) Stages of Word Recognition in Early
Reading Development, Scandinavian Journal of Educational
Research, 32:4, 163-182, DOI: 10.1080/0031383880320402

The crossing point of this research with mine is that it proves that the decoding skills
of young learners develop gradually to reach a state where the reader begins to
recognize words even without decoding them letter by letter. The writers developed a
model to study how reading skill is developed and suggested that detecting any reading
disability should be understood within a developmental framework.
This article supports my claim that my students lost a chain in their development when
the curriculum didn’t considerate the gradual complexity of the readings presented in
the textbook between 4th and 5th grades.

- Morag Stuart & Max Coltheart (1988) Does reading develop in a sequence of
stages?, Cognition Journal, Volume 30, Issue 2, November 1988, Pages 139-
181

Even if learning to read is conceptualised as a sequence of stages, not all children pass
through the same sequence of stages. And this is the case if they are not facing a
problem like my research problem.

Also slow and hesitant readers are recognized as disabled readers who on certain
point or period of time lost their connection with the natural gradual development of
reading for personal or external reasons.

- Maryanne Wolf & Tami Katzir-Cohen (2001) Reading Fluency and Its
Intervention, Scientific Studies of Reading, 5:3, 211-
239, DOI: 10.1207/S1532799XSSR0503_2

This article represents a research on reading fluency: definition, component structure,

and theory-based intervention. The 1st section describes several historical approaches
to fluency and the components of fluent reading that are implicit in these approaches.
The writers then present their own developmental- and component-based definition of
reading fluency. In the 2nd section they discuss how different types of current fluency
interventions correspond to particular components in fluency's structure and to
particular phases of its development. The last section presents an overview of an
experimental fluency program that attempts to address multiple components in the
development of fluent reading.

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- Hasbrouck, J. and Tindal, G.A. (2006), Oral Reading Fluency Norms: A
Valuable Assessment Tool for Reading Teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59:
636-644. doi:10.1598/RT.59.7.3

The authors developed a set of norms for oral reading fluency for grades 1–8. This
article discusses the application of these norms to three important assessment activities
related to improving students' reading achievement:
Screening students for possible reading problems.
Diagnosing deficits in students' fluency.
Monitoring the progress of students receiving supplementary instruction or intensive
intervention in reading.

- Linnea C. Ehri (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word

Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, Scientific Studies of
Reading, 18:1, 5-21, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to

bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It
explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and
to acquire vocabulary words from print. This development is portrayed by Ehri (2005)
as a sequence of overlapping phases, each characterized by the predominant type of
connection linking spellings of words to their pronunciations in memory. During
development, the connections improve in quality and word-learning value, from visual
nonalphabetic, to partial alphabetic, to full grapho-phonemic, to consolidated grapho-
syllabic and grapho-morphemic. OM is enabled by phonemic awareness and
grapheme-phoneme knowledge. Recent findings indicate that OM to support sight
word reading is facilitated when beginners are taught about articulatory features of
phonemes and when grapheme-phoneme relations are taught with letter-embedded
picture mnemonics. Vocabulary learning is facilitated when spellings accompany
pronunciations and meanings of new words to activate OM.

- Bridge, C. A., Winograd, P. N., & Haley, D. (1983). Using predictable

materials vs. preprimers to teach beginning sight words. The Reading
Teacher, 36(9), 884-891.

This article is discussing the effectiveness of teaching sight vocabulary to beginners

through patterned language or structured language materials. Patterned books contain
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 repetitive structures that enable readers to predict the next word or line or episode.
After hearing such materials read aloud, children can join in and "read" along even
though at that point they are probably not able to recognize the indivisual words.
However, repeated opportunities to recognize high frequency words in dependable
contexts help them develop a sight vocabulary that can soon be recognized in other
contexts.

- Charlton, B., Williams, R. L., & McLaughlin, T. F. (2005). Educational

Games: A Technique to Accelerate the Acquisition of Reading Skills of Children
with Learning Disabilities. International Journal of Special Education, 20(2),
66-72.

This study evaluated the effects of educational games on the performance of eight
elementary school students with learning disabilities. The effects of educational
games were evaluated in a multiple baseline design across students. The results
indicated that each student improved their performance on reading when educational
games were in effect. These differences were also educationally significant. Practical
considerations and implications of educational games for adoption in the classroom
were discussed.

Peirce, N., Conlan, O., & Wade, V. (2008, November). Adaptive educational
games: Providing non-invasive personalised learning experiences. In 2008
second IEEE international conference on digital game and intelligent toy
enhanced learning (pp. 28-35).

This research paper talks about the benefits of using adaptive educational games, like
reading-oriented ones in my case.
Educational games have the potential to provide intrinsically motivating learning
experiences that immerse and engage the learner. However, the much heralded
benefits of educational games seldom consider the one-size-fits-all approach to
education they typically embody. The benefit provided by adaptive educational games
is that of a motivating environment reinforced with a personalized learning
experience. However, adapting a game to enhance its educational benefit endangers
its intrinsic motivation and flow. This paper proposes a novel approach for non-
invasively adapting a game to enable a personalized learning experience. This is
achieved using an innovative, generic and reusable architecture, without mitigating
the motivational features of gaming.

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3. Chapter Three
An Inside View of My Research Process: A Roadmap of My Journey

In other words it's the methodology of my research. In this chapter, I presented what how
things went on from the scratch until the end. I began with stating out the research questions
that the research meant to give answers as results of my intervention. Then I moved explain
my strategy and how will my intervention will look like. After that I framed my action plan
with all lessons plan. Then I presented my data collection tools, and finally the students who I
chose to work with as sample of the research.

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3.1 Research questions
The main research question will be revolving around the efficiency of the strategy that
I chose to improve my students reading fluency. So the main research question will be:
How will reading-oriented educational games help 5th graders overcome their delayed
reading fluency?

But it will worthwhile to see the effects of applying the strategy on other aspects of the
reading skill, and from here other questions could be generated:

 How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' reading speed?

 How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' pronunciation?
 How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' comprehension?
 How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' other reading
related skills such as decoding, sentence structure and cohesion, intonation,
expression… etc.?
 How will reading-oriented educational games affect students' engagement,
attitude and enthusiasm to read?

For the aim of trying to answer these questions, paragraphs about each question are
included in the different evaluation rubrics.

3.2 Research design and my strategy

My research is an action research, which means that there are activities to happen, and
these activities are to take place beside my regular teaching duties and curriculum demands.
Therefore, applying the research needs not to interrupt or the semester plan and students '
academic progress in the other aspects of the language even if the research itself aims to
enhance the reading skill.

Since the research is time consuming for I need some dedicated lessons to implement it I
find It of crucial importance to follow an action plan which will be included later so maintain
coincidence with other educational activities.

My plan is constructed on two main foundations; first, the logical chronological order of
actions and sequences. What I mean by actions are my actions as a teacher and things to be
done on the learners' side. The sequences are likewise are happening on both sides. For
example, one of my actions will be presenting a material or a task, and the learners' action
will be responding by engagement, execution or follow the instructions (can be defined as a
response), then I can response after that by means of collecting data, analysis or give

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feedback and so on. The second foundation is academic endoscopy, which means that I want
my research and research steps to be clear enough for others to be able to benefit from it or
even to follow the steps.

Here is a brief chronological review to my research steps and further detailed explanation will
be provided in the action plan section:

1. The first step is what I believe like a shortcut cut to call for students' engagement. This can
be carried out through bringing the learners inside the research. For this purpose the first class
will be just talking to the students and recording their personal reflections or even can be
developed to one-to-one conferencing. The teacher and the students can discuss directly the
targeted learning problem making sure that the students are aware of it. Also the strategy,
steps and events of the research can be presented at this point.

2. Then a series of activities to be conducted. In my research case these activities are mainly
educational games that are especially designed to improve reading fluency. Before every
game, the students are supplied with a reading material to practice, and in my research I will
concentrate, as part of my research also, on lists of sight words.

3. All the way the teacher is to collect as much data with all possible means and ways. I
personally kept a note journal, audio and video recordings, predesigned evaluation rubrics
and feedback forms. The goals of these data collection tools are to monitor students'
performance, check students' progress, make judgments, give feedbacks and do any necessary
modifications and adjustments.

4. Finally, a performance task at the end of the research is of significant importance, the
performance task will test the entire journey's run to come up with the final results,
conclusions and judgments about the overall efficiency and benefit of the applied strategy.
It's like the moment of truth where all the efforts on both sides are tested hoping that they
didn’t go with vain. For the final performance I chose to give my students a slightly long
reading text with a video recording and an evaluation rubric in my hand. Then I can do
comparisons between student's final performance and his/her performance in different
[Link].

21
My strategy:

My strategy is centralized and based on using educational games to help my student

overcome their delayed reading fluency. I suggested using reading-oriented educational
games, these games also use well prepared sight words as the main part of their content.

Sight words:
Sight words account for a large percentage (up to 75%) of the words used in
beginning children's print materials. The advantage for children being able to
recognize sight words automatically is that a beginning reader will be able to
identify the majority of words in a beginning text before they even attempt to read
it; therefore, allowing the child to concentrate on meaning and comprehension as
they read without having to stop and decode every single word. Advocates of
whole-word instruction believe that being able to recognize a large number of
sight words gives students a better start to learning to read. Ravitch (2007)

My ambitious treatment is to combine both strategies to come up with a

comprehensive approach to debug delayed reading fluency as a learning problem.

The idea is to empower the students to beat their hesitation and not to stuck and
waste time while reading in decoding words. The interruption of reading may cause other
undesired deficits of losing connection and lessen the level of understanding.

I chose to name the problem as "delayed reading fluency" for many reasons:

- I used the word "delayed" to refer to my belief that my students will reach the desired
reading fluency sooner or later and my research is like an accelerating agent to arrive
there.

- Not being able to read fluently creates a problem because fluency is the ability to read
with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. Children also need to understand what they
read. When reading aloud, fluent readers read in phrases and add intonation
appropriately. Their reading is smooth and has expression. (Bullerman 2016)

22
 3.3 Action plan:

Date Number
Description of Suggested Data
of Objectives My Role Student Role
the Intervention Collection Tools
classes

18/02/2020 1 Diagnostic - Trying to answer sub- - Prepare the needed To read the given - Teacher's notes.
evaluation question 1; collecting reading text. reading task. - Video and audio
date about students' - Record individual recordings
current learning notes about students' - Diagnostic rubric.
23/02/2020 1 Introducing the - Providing the students -Prepare "sight words" -To practice - Notes about
challenge. performance.
needed with words needed to sheets. pronouncing the students'
materials initiate the next words. performance.
-Explain that we are
teaching procedure. - Individual audio
going to practice -Students are asked to
recordings.
pronouncing the practice in class and
words in the sheets at home as well.
correctly.

-Modeling the way of

pronunciation for
the students.

23
10/03/2020 2 - Educational - To read with correct - To explain the game - To play the game and - Teacher's notes
game No. 1 pronunciation and a and its rules. try to win. - Game 1 rubric.
+
(Wonder Under) reasonable speed in my - To organize roles - Video and audio
12/03/2020
"Further explanation way to answer sub- and the way of recordings.
about the game in
questions 1+2. execution.
the appendices"
- Students to show a - Monitor students'
desired degree of performance and
comprehension. engagement.
- Some discussion and
feedback after
application.
18/03/2020 1 - Educational - To read with speed. - To explain the game - To play the game and - Teacher's notes.
game No. 2 - Students to show a and its rules. try to win. - Game 2 rubric.
(Unwrap the desired degree of - To organize roles - Video and audio
gift) comprehension to what and the way of recordings.
they read. execution.
- Monitor students'
performance and
engagement.
- Some discussion and
feedback after
application.

24
30/03/2020 2 - Educational - To read with good - To explain the game - To play the game and - Teacher's notes.
game No. 3 pronunciation and and its rules. try to win. - Game 2 rubric.
+
speed. - To organize roles - Video and audio
(Read your blog)
2/04/2020
and the way of recordings.
execution.
- Monitor students'
performance and
engagement.
- Some discussion
and feedback after
application.

25
7/04/2020 2 - Educational - - To explain the game - To play the game and - Teacher's notes.
game No. 4 and its rules. try to win. - Game 2 rubric.
+
(Buy a flower) - To organize roles - Video and audio
10/04/2020
and the way of recordings.
execution.
- - Monitor students'
performance and
engagement.
- Some discussion and
feedback after
application.
14/04/2020 2 - Final - To read a given text in - Prepare a reading - To read a reasonably - Teacher's notes.
performance a good speed and text especially long text given by the - Final evaluation
+
task and pronunciation. designed to measure teacher rubric includes all
16/04/2020
evaluation - Its preferable to add students' progress. points that cover
intonation and - Ask students to read research questions.
expression to the text. while the teacher
record video/ audio
and fill an
evaluation rubric.

26
3.4 Data collection tools

In my research, as an action research, I will use all what I think will be necessary
assessment tools in different ways and in different steps in my research to get a clearer
vision about the problem various dimensions. I'll use and implement several data
collection tools which serves different inquiry purposes.

For strengthening the notion of problem existence, first, I'll use a diagnostic
assessment contains three tools to solidify the evidence that proves the problem existence.
I'll use a kit contains three things; a prepared reading material, a performance rubric,
audio-visual recordings and a journal of my own notes.

During my implementation, I'll use other structural and formative assessment and
evaluation tools. These tools include also, recordings and my notes record. these will aim
to keep things on track, making sure that these tools are appropriate to give clear idea
about the learners' progress and providing chances to give feedback and to make any
necessary changes or adjustments in different stages of the research.

For final stages, I'll use tools similar to that used in the first stage of diagnose. But this
time they will be as measures of performance coming up with the all the changes and
developments that could be as outcomes of applying the chosen strategy. these evaluation
tools can be more detailed in this stage since I am depending on them now to put down
my final conclusions and results and judgments about the strategy overall efficiency as
well.

I find it here important to mention that all the assessment tools used in the research
have to be clear and precise enough to represent a model that can be understood by
readers of the research or those who want to adopt it in their future teaching.

My sample

I chose 5th graders in my school as a sample for my study. I chose seven students who
have shown varied levels in reading skill competence. My choice for the 5th grade was

27
governed by the particularity of the dilemma since the research suggests that the problem
happens as a transformation results from moving from grade 4 to grade 5.

I taught in different schools before the current one, the school and the students are not
changing variables in this case because my colleagues and I have noticed this problem with
fifth graders in general in different schools.

Also my choice undergoes my personal desire as a teacher to enhance my pupils'

performance in reading to this will develop their progress in the language.

Up to obligatory and exceptional circumstances as a result of COVID19 pandemic

worldwide and locally and as a result of declaring emergency rules in Palestinian territories
schools were closed and so my implementation on the whole sample was interrupted. I
managed to keep in touch with 3 of the students who I continued implementation with them
form the 4th lesson.

28
4. Chapter Four
What I Have Learned as Related to My Intervention: My Story in
the Field

I this chapter, I reviewed some important things that worth to mention other than the
major findings of the research. Some examples from my spectacle about what was going on
before, while and after implementing the strategy and other future hopes were cited.

29
 Some of the things that I have found before, during and after applying my strategy
where expected and noticeable and common and others were emergence while some things
needed more investigation.

1. The students were aware of the learning difficulty. They expressed that verbally in
different occasions in the classes and reading activities before even my thinking of
doing an intervention. This had shortened the time to create mutual agreement between
me and them about the necessity for a remedial plan to overcome this problem as the
first step of applying the strategy.

2. The cooperation of the school educational staff is of high importance. The first thing
that I worked on is to acknowledge the school principal about my intention to apply
such intervention. She expressed her cognizance of the dilemma and instantly
appreciated the idea and the effort and she stated that she is keen to see the outcomes of
the strategy. Also she attended the first class and took notes. Also I presented the idea
to my colleague teachers who also encouraged me to go on and offered any services. I
am blessed to have these fellows who believed in me and who were convinced that the
classes and my effort won't go in vain.

3. Some students have other severe learning difficulties. Two of the students were
unable to decode words and whom I have been applying another remedial program
beginning from revising the alphabets and pronunciation at the start of the school year.
I first thought of excluding them from the research sample and later decided to include
them to see what can be the effect of the strategy on that case. For the surprise, they
showed unexpected outputs in two phases; first, I think for that the strategy classes
were variant in their activities (mainly games) and included some physical interaction,
these students interacted in most of them for the sake of participation only with their
peers and the general enthusiastic atmosphere. Then when it's time to practice sight
words they appeared to have a good short memorizing skill. They tend to pronounce all
the words in the word list but they forgot most of them when it's time to read the
selected texts. This can be an indicator for the strategy success, but I believe it's
deceiving and cannot be taken for granted if those students are left alone in out of the
governed context situations where decoding skill is in demand.

4. The data collection tools are have to be built and used in a way that insure using
them as records for different kinds of use. A few different types of data collection tools

30
 are commonly discussed in education circles: formative and summative. Formative
data is any data gathered from students that can help you understand what your
students' understanding level, and is often used to modify teaching strategies or
materials in the immediate future. Summative data collection tools is generally more
high-stakes and often takes the form of end of learning tests and projects. Summative
data can also be used as a long term form of formative data, as it helps to inform
teaching in the more distant future. Most data collection tools can be modified to gather
either formative or summative data, but in my case the most useful thing is to have a
record for these data to be able to assist understanding, modify my strategy, give
feedback or radically judge the overall success of the strategy by revising the students
different results. I have learned to record any potential progress, learning difficulty,
assignments results and any other useful notes. All data and their analysis can be as
indicators and evidence for the change in the students understanding or the need for
strategic modification. I came out with much date that I kept in video and audio
recordings, rubrics and evaluation sheets and my own journal.

5. I hope that this dilemma will be fixed by solving the critical gap in 4th and 5th grade
curriculum textbooks. In the future, this strategy that I used is better to be as a remedial plan
for the few students who face this learning difficulty instead of applying it on the whole class.
According to Shanahan (2013), the text level is the key factor in student learning and the
Instructional-level theory posits that text difficulty is the important factor or the active
ingredient in learning.

31
5. Chapter Five
Bringing It Together: A Discussion of the Major Finding of My
Research

This research is not an experimental one, in social sciences and especially in the
educational field there should be no immoral gambling on learners' cognition empowerment
and their academic progress. Therefore, the usefulness and effectiveness of the strategy that I
chose (educational games) has been studied, proved and recommended many times in
previous researches in education. What is being tested in my research is not the strategy
itself, but the specifications I added to it. So "will and how will reading-oriented educational
game affect learners' reading fluency? " have to be the main concerns of the study.

The idea is to use educational games as conveyor medium to target the needed skill
(reading fluency), for all what educational games proved to rise in the learner's side; more
and smoother engagement, motivation, self-esteem, desired competition … etc.

The main goal of the research was to concentrate on developing learners' reading fluency,
but on the road other changes and developments were noticed in other aspects of the reading
skill. In what follows are the main research results and my findings:

32
 Reading speed and fluency:

The strategy came with great success in developing the students reading speed. I will show
this success by comparing the students' performance before and after implementing the
strategy. Not to forget here that the main goal of the strategy is to improve the students
reading fluency, the student showed different progress responses depending on their
academic levels of achievements. The students' levels are divergent so it's expected to have
different degrees of progress after applying the strategy.

Pre data:

The students' performance and marks in previous reading tasks and tests considered as the
main source of pre data. For collecting data about the student's current reading fluency, I used
a prepared reading material (different texts) and asked students to read while I took notes and
filled in a specially designed rubric:

Amy went to her aunt’s wedding in the summer.

She wore a yellow dress. Her aunt wore a long,
white dress. She got married.

The wolf put his left shoe on the road. He hid

behind a tree. The farmer saw the shoe. He wanted
two shoes.

The family visited the zoo. It was very beautiful.

It had lots of animals. Omar’s favourite animal was
the giraffe.

Figure 2: Selected reading texts

33
Diagnostic Evolutional rubric:

Name: ______________________

Scope / Point of concentration Always Sometimes Neutral Never

1 Reading word by word 0 1 1.5 2

2 Reading smoothly and slowly 2 1.5 1 0

3 Reading in acceptable pace 2 1.5 1 0

4 Read with good intonation 2 1.5 1 0

5 Do unnecessary stops 0 1 1.5 2

6 Give care to punctuation marks 2 1.5 1 0

Overall commentary
12

Figure 3: Diagnostic Evaluation Rubric

34
In figure 1 the students were given selected texts in and out of their reading textbook. The
reading texts were selected and built on base of moderate difficulty and familiarity. The aim
of this activity is to make a clear view of the learning difficulty and as evidence of its
existence.

Figure 2 is the used diagnostic rubric. The same rubric is used in different stages of the
strategy implementation to measure and monitor the student progress. The numeric values for
the rubric paragraphs are for future comparison purposes coming next in the research.

Figure 4: Sample of implementing the diagnostic evaluation rubric

You can see in Figure 3, as a data collection tool, the performance of one of the students in
the reading diagnosis. The rubric is filled with numeric inferences for future performance
evaluation. Also some notes are added; general notes and specific to the subject notes

35
 Post data:

After recording and collecting data about students' first performance, further tools are used
to collect data in the following steps of the research to keep monitoring and evaluating
students' progress after applying the strategy. The same diagnostic rubric is used to show if
there is a positive progress and to what degree by means of comparison.

Figure 5: Sample of implementing the diagnostic evaluation rubric

In Figure 4, the same rubric is applied first for diagnosis and then for evaluation after four
classes of implementation. The collected data of all students were investigated for progress
comparison using statistical analysis chart.

12

10

8
Diagnostic Rubric Value
6
Evaluation after 4 classes

0
Manar Hamza Wajeeh
Chart 1: Diagnostic results compared with after 4 classes results

36
 Reading comprehension:

We are talking about reading a loud here, but I don't want to discuss reading
comprehension in depth. Reading comprehension disability is a big theme with vast
dimension to cover. The simplest definition of reading comprehension disability is that
"students read but they do not understand or remember what they've read". There are many
reasons may compile and be responsible for not comprehending a text and in my research I
wanted to see how will implementing reading-oriented educational games affect or improve
reading comprehension.3

Logically, a student will not understand texts if he cannot read well, for there are basic and
fundamental subskills to reach reading fluency. On the way to improve my students' reading
fluency we did several explanations, exercises and notes about some aspects of reading
fluency that can help with comprehension as well. And let's not forget that they're 5th graders
and their reading comprehension is expected to develop in future academic progress. For
example:

- Students now know the meaning of the punctuation marks, which helped them to stop or to
take break when they come across them. They also know now to give the right intonation to
different kinds of sentences and questions.

- They were trained not to do unnecessary stops which will interrupt the flow of the meaning
and keep reading longer sentences. Thus the meaning is assisted by uninterrupted reading
which involved consistency of understanding.

- Sentence understanding was improved by the intensive exposure to sight words which
resulted interrupting the fluency of reading by not wasting time and losing connections with
trying to decode and pronounce words that they are now familiar with.

When readers learn to recognize words by sight, it increases their overall reading
comprehension because they develop a mental storehouse of words and their meanings,
which help them, understand other words in the context of sentences. Most teachers teach

3Therrien, W. J. (2004). Fluency and comprehension gains as a result of repeated reading: A meta-
analysis. Remedial and special education, 25(4), 252-261.

37
sight words early in the first grade because of this reason. Learning sight words also enhance
spelling skills. McArthur, G., Castles, A., Kohnen (2015)

But all that noticeable comprehension improvement needs to be proved by further

dedicated investigation (research).

Students' engagement, attitude and enthusiasm to read:

Educational games in general are motivation generators. There are many proved
benefits for playing games in the classroom. From time to time, teachers should try to
incorporate at least one game into one of the key learning areas as either a teaching and
learning tool, assessment strategy or classroom motivator. When playing games, students
become more engaged in their learning, taught content is reinforced and class positivity is
increased.

Students' engagement in the strategy classes and activities showed more preference
than the regular classes. Their enhanced engagement is clear also when they interact with the
game and with the peers. Some students stated "When will we take the next class?" or "What
the next game will be?. They will challenge each other in the educational game, but in a
preferred shapes and results of a competition.

Their overall attitude especially toward reading has been changed. Now they are more
encouraged to read as they feel more confident to enter the texts empowered by their belief
that they are familiar with many words of it and they are unhesitant to spout and read with
speed with no worries of frequent disappointing stops and minor mistakes of pronunciation
which I repeatedly assisted during implementing the strategy.

Their general attitude in classes has likely turned consistent and harmonious, and
those shy and normally not participating students are getting more involved in activities of
diverse challengeable and variant inelegancies.

38
 And here some pictures is an example shows how they were engaged in one of the
activities preparing to read their own blog.

Figure 6: Read your Blog activity

Other reading related skills:

Tow reading aspects I was interested in improving them; intonation and expression.
These aspects of reading, also in speaking, are worth of being taught and to give them special
care as skills in other dedicated classes. But I found it quite useful to train the students to
utter phrases and sentences with intonation and expression to promote their reading fluency
with all its aspects.

By different training on different kind of intonation, now they can give phrases and
sentences more meaning; they know when it’s a question, exclamation or it's just a statement
and read accordingly.

The reading expression is governed by the student understanding of what he/she

reads. Simply if the student doesn’t understand what he/she reads the text will be like dead

39
pale words, pronounced correctly but with no feelings added. The given reading texts in the
strategy and in the performance evaluation assessments where chosen as models to exercise
on intonation and express. Some of them where well-known stories like "The Fox and The
Greedy Farmer". It was an opportunity to the students to express their feelings about the text
in their reading mode and they were able to perform so in different occasions while they read
the texts. They sometimes mimic the fox voice in the story in malicious way.

Conclusions and suggestions:

1. Most of the students in grade 5 in the public schools have reading fluency problem. When I
shared my concern about the problem with my English language colleague teachers and with
my directorate supervisor, they all expressed their agreement on that the majority of the
students in different schools face the same problem.

I recommend here that the Ministry of Education and the Curriculum Centre have to do
something about that. I haven't prepared a full suggested plan to fix this dilemma within the
curriculum, but the first thought came to my mind is to work on increase the length of
readings by the end (in the final units) of 4th grade second semester pupil's book and to reduce
that length on the side of the beginning of 5th grade first semester book in a reasonable way
which insures to meet in the middle in a sustainable developing degree of text complexity.

2. Include educational games in the curriculum. Educational games can be successfully used
to achieve better methods for both learning and teaching and now there is even a terminology
regarding this like the concept of Game-Based Learning (GBL) It basically means
incorporating games in your medium of instruction. One of the prime challenges educators
face is of teaching a huge group of students, all of whom are unique and have totally different
personalities, wave-length of learning and capabilities. With great expectations, students get
an opportunity to work on various educational games along with rewards and surprise
elements which help to keep their interest in learning.

Game-based learning plays a vital role in teaching by offering the opportunity for students to
collaborate, communicate, interact and work in teams with each other. Strategy-based games
enhance the functioning of the brain, inspire children to learn new things, develop their skills
and build an emotional connect to learn the subject matter. The feature of receiving feedback
immediately after playing a game gives insight on how to improve the performance in a

40
positive way. Incorporating the educational learning objectives along with the curriculum
gives a completely new form to learning. Felicia (2019)

Maybe it will not be convenient to consume all classes on educational games for elementary
students even if this seems to be a common case in kindergartens a 1st graders, but it is
worthwhile to add this attractive element once a unit I think.

3. I recommend not using material rewards. Many teachers use rewards nowadays in their
teaching and justify this practice by stating out the disciplinary positive impact of using them
and some refers to the claims of the pedagogical positive effects of them. Personally I agree
on both behavioral and pedagogical benefits of rewards, but I didn't use them in my strategy
since I've already studied the their negative of using rewards in education and I wanted my
results to be more reliable in its findings and have no misleading ones affected by the
deceptive impacts of the influences of negative using rewards. Using a reward system in
teaching proved to have negative defects. e.g. Students can become addicted to rewards and
they won't engage anymore without them, students also will get used to have rewards and
they will expect them every time and lose the element of surprise, students focus will be on
finishing the task and win instead of learning the meant lesson, and other bad influence
effects. But verbal encouragement, praise and highlighted positive feedback were existent
within my strategy implementation.

The reward system of "sticks and carrots" can be very successful for a short period of time
and influence behavior in a positive way. Nonetheless, in the long run, this system does not
hold what it promises and can have negative consequences for your overall motivation.
Particularly with extrinsic motivation, there is the risk that the desirable behavior stops as
soon as the rewards end. That's why promoting certain behavior through praise and
explaining the benefits of a particular behavior might be more successful than just giving
rewards even if it is more time and nerve-consuming.4

4. Reading fluency enhanced other language skills. By my own observations and in my

personal journal I found that other language skills were affected as a result of applying the
strategy and the students' developed fluency. The 4 main language skills are interlaced and

4
Predictably Irrational. The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008)

41
collaborative, and I noticed the improvement in their speaking, writing and listening. Now the
can spell many words they saw before and write it correctly. They speak more since they
stored more words, phrases and sentences from the continuous activities. For example, they
were able to speak about their selves referring to one of the activities "Read Your Blog".

42
Chapter Six
Further Reflection on My Journey

Here I set forth some reflections and mediations about the events of the research. Also I
state my opinion about the implemented strategy and its outcomes. And what I am intending
to do in future. These all are presented in four dimensions; theoretical reflections,
methodological reflections, field reflections and personal reflections.

43
 First, I think that admitting to have a problem was the main breakthrough and motif to
face it and do something about it. I can simply finish the curriculum demands with my
students regardless to their quality of performance or final understanding. But my conception
is that not resolving and overcoming that problem will represent an obstacle on the way of the
student learning and my amount of efforts to pay in the future. So I believe that it's
conventional to link students' success with their teacher success.
Some students are sentenced by inadequacy in most disciplines referring to them as
"week students" and their teacher likely to agree on this. In my classes such notion does not
exist, and as I mentioned earlier in this report I was thinking and actually was advised to
exclude some "week students" from my research. But I deeply believe, and I had learned, that
some of the students have different intelligences and produce different performances and
understanding relevantly. As an educator, it is useful to think about the different ways that
information can be presented. However, it is critical to not classify students as being specific
types of learners nor as having an innate or fixed type of intelligence. This was apparent
when those "week students" were actively participating in the activities of the strategy and
their results skeptical analysis.
When I began to search for a suitable strategy for resolving the problem and also suits my
students as elementary young learners, two things where in my mind; one of them was the
originality and innovation of the strategy as a requirement for my academic research project,
and the other thing that I was thinking of is that I want something which guarantees students
engagement, motivation and enthusiasm to participate. So when I was surfing the literature
theoretical views about the matter I came up with the educational games thought, also I
realized that these games should be directed in a way that assists reading, then I thought if I
am using the same content of the textbook then the students interest will be limited to the
game rules and competition only and this can happen even with using a special content also.
But the need for a special content was emphasized when I sensed the significance and the
predictable effect of using condensed and intensive content which meant and designed to
proceed for further and future learning purposes. I another word, I want a content that will
still valid while the progress in their academic levels. And from this point my idea of using
sight words as the content of educational games has taken shape.
It was quite useful to discuss the problem with the students. They showed good
realization about it and they expressed their desire to overcome it. Also introducing the
strategy was met with their favor. The whole introductory part in the first class had put us, me
and the students, in a shred platform where I was able to begin supported by their true will to

44
overcome the problem and they were also invited to be involved in their own learning and
understanding.
Teacher has to update his knowledge in the educational field. This will help the teacher to
make use of the recent theories and researches in education that may help him/her in assisting
their teaching and find resources to beat of any rising learning difficulty in his classroom. I
benefited a lot from all those researches, books, articles and scholar works especially those
that were recent up to the last year (2019).
Teachers sometimes underestimate the usefulness of educational games, some teachers
consider them as waste of time, and others cannot really differentiate between educational
and non-educational games. It's not a place to discuss psychological effects of using
educational games on students, but imagine that we are talking about children who are 12 or
13 years old, what else they are thinking of beside playing? What if we can exploit their need
to play with our intention to give them the desired learning?
I mentioned earlier in this report that this strategy can be used in other context with other
students in different levels as a remedial procedure. And I am welling to use it again with
older students next year. I think that 5th grade is like battle field for teachers and students, the
lucky students can survive it out with the reading fluency gained.
Now I am ready to conquer future coming difficulties in the same approach and
methodology where I can reuse all the obtained experiences thought this intervention. I will
not set and complain without doing anything; the famous English philosopher Herbert
Spencer once said "The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action".
Teacher hasn’t to be frustrated or disappointed if the strategy showed some
malfunctioning in one or more of its steps. As a matter of fact, the teacher able to spot these
failures is a sign of going in the right direction and there will be always a space to modify and
change where necessary. The same thing is applicable with outcomes, this happened with me
with two students who came out the implementation with now big improvement and they
need further effort to be paid. This will not of course eliminate the feeling of reward
accompanied with realizing that 5 out of 7 students showed a significant development.

45
References

- Charlton, B., Williams, R. L., & McLaughlin, T. F. (2005). Educational Games: A

Technique to Accelerate the Acquisition of Reading Skills of Children with Learning
Disabilities. International Journal of Special Education, 20(2), 66-72.

- Deater Deckard, K., Chang, M., & Evans, M. E. (2013). Engagement states and learning
from educational games. New directions for child and adolescent development, 2013(139),
21-30.

- Deci, E. L. (1976). The hidden costs of rewards. Organizational Dynamics, 4(3), 61-72

- Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments
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 Appendices

Lesson 1 plan
Tuesday 18/02/2020

Title of Class Diagnostic evaluation / Overcoming

delayed reading fluency

Unit Topic - grade Grade 5

Enduring Understandings - The importance of reading fluency for

their learning progress.
What specific concepts will students acquire as a result of
this class?

Content Knowledge It’s a diagnostic procedure, so no new

What specific content knowledge will students acquire as knowledge supposed to be obtained
a result of this class?

Skills - Targeting reading fluency.

What are the specific skills developed by this class?

Length of Class 40 minutes

Approximately how long will this class take?

Overview of Class - Explaining the learning problem.

Brief summarization of the class: 1-2 sentences - Reading some text.
- Feedback about learners’
performance

Prior Knowledge How to decode words.

Are there specific knowledge or skills the students must
have before they begin this class?

Resources Needed - A selected reading text from the book.

Books? References? A/V Materials?

Process of Class 00:00 – 00:10

Explain how class will unfold. Write this section so that - Doing an introduction where the
another teacher could follow your instructions. Be sure to teacher describes the learning problem
include a hook or warm-up and assessment activities. / challenge to the students recording
notes about their understanding of the

48
How much time do you estimate each step will take? problem and their expectations.
00:10-00:30
- Asking students individually to read
the prepared text.
- The teacher to fill in the evaluation
rubric.
00:30-00:40
- Give the student feedback about their
performance.

Assessment -To fill in the prepared rubric about the

students’ performance.
How will you know that the class was successful?
Describe what type of student assessments you will use to -Audio and video recordings.
evaluate understanding. Include the criteria you will use
or attach a rubric.

Selected text/s:

Amy went to her aunt’s wedding in the summer.

She wore a yellow dress. Her aunt wore a long,
white dress. She got married.

The wolf put his left shoe on the road. He hid

behind a tree. The farmer saw the shoe. He wanted
two shoes.

The family visited the zoo. It was very beautiful.

It had lots of animals. Omar’s favourite animal was
the giraffe.

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 Lesson 2 plan
Tuesday 23/02/2020

Title of Class Sight words

Unit Topic - grade Grade 5

Enduring Understandings - We don’t need to decode each word

What specific concepts will students acquire as a result of letter by letter to pronounce and read.
this class?

Content Knowledge - Some new vocabulary combined

What specific content knowledge will students acquire as with familiar words.
a result of this class? - The way to pronounce these words.

Skills - Targeting reading fluency.

What are the specific skills developed by this class?

Length of Class 40 minutes

Approximately how long will this class take?

Overview of Class - Explaining what the sight words

are and what we are going to do
Brief summarization of the class: 1-2 sentences
with sight words sheets.
- Practice pronouncing the words
and the teacher as a model.
- Students to try reading the sheet by
themselves.

Prior Knowledge - How to decode words.

Are there specific knowledge or skills the students must - How to pronounce some familiar
have before they begin this class? words.

Resources Needed - Prepared sight word sheets.

Books? References? A/V Materials?

Process of Class 00:00 – 00:10

Explain how class will unfold. Write this section so that - Doing an introduction where the
another teacher could follow your instructions. Be sure to teacher explains what is meant by sight
include a hook or warm-up and assessment activities. words, their importance and why we

50
How much time do you estimate each step will take? are going to learn about them.
- Explaining that we are going to use
these words in future reading-oriented
educational games.
00:00-00:10
- Doing an introduction about sight
words.
- Distributing sight words sheets.
00:10-00:25
- Modeling the way how we pronounce
the words.
- Asking the students to practice in pairs
until each time comes.
- Asking students one by one to read the
words in his sheet.
00:25-00:40
- Asking if anybody can bring words
together to form a sentence and write it
on board.

Assessment - Write notes about the class and students

engagement and performance.
How will you know that the class was successful?
Describe what type of student assessments you will use to - Audio recordings.
evaluate understanding. Include the criteria you will use
or attach a rubric.

Sight words:

Sight words, often also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that
young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can
automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.

51
Sight words / Practice sheet 1

Words in this sheet are selected on two basis; high frequency words and words selected from
units 10+11+12 of the text book.

52
 Lesson 3 + 4 plan
Tuesday and Thursday 10+12/03/2020

Title of Class Educational Game No.1

Wonder Under

Unit Topic - grade Grade 5

Enduring Understandings - The importance of reading fluency for

their learning progress.
What specific concepts will students acquire as a result of
this class? - Sentences cohesion.

Content Knowledge - More words were presented in sight

What specific content knowledge will students acquire as words sheet.
a result of this class? - The sentences must be coherent to form a
text.

Skills - Targeting reading fluency.

What are the specific skills developed by this class?

Length of Class 40 minutes X 2 classes

Approximately how long will this class take?

Overview of Class - Presenting a new sight words sheet

to practice pronouncing them.
Brief summarization of the class: 1-2 sentences
- Explaining the game and its rules.
- Feedback about learners’
performance

Prior Knowledge - How to decode words.

Are there specific knowledge or skills the students must - Some titles on board students are
have before they begin this class? familiar with.

Resources Needed - Selected titles from and out of the

Books? References? A/V Materials? book.
- Colored papers, scotch tape, permanent
markers and acrobatic plastic rings.

Process of Class 00:00 – 00:10

Explain how class will unfold. Write this section so that - Doing an introduction where the
another teacher could follow your instructions. Be sure to teacher describes the game and its
include a hook or warm-up and assessment activities. rules and present the sight words sheet.

53
How much time do you estimate each step will take? Then students to practice pronouncing
them by modeling the teacher, with
peers and by themselves.
00:10-00:30
- Dividing the students into groups of 3
that each group to play the game after
the other group.
- The teacher to fill in the evaluation
rubric and start the video recording.
00:30-00:40
- Give the student feedback about their
performance.
- Next lesson we will repeat the game
with different titles.

Assessment -To fill in the prepared rubric about the

students’ performance.
How will you know that the class was successful?
Describe what type of student assessments you will use to -Audio and video recordings.
evaluate understanding. Include the criteria you will use
or attach a rubric.

54
 Educational games:

Game 1: Wonder Under

 3 stories / titles on 3 sections of the board.
 The title sentences are hid under cones on the floor.
 Each student has to find relevant sentences for his title.
 He/She to hang sentences in the right order under the title.
 All the 3 students have to finish their titles.
 Then each student has to read his text.
 Grading is for timing and fluency of reading.

Game 2: Unwrap the gift

 A gift is wraped ncely on the teachers desk.
 The teacher indicates that the gift is wraped with multible layers.
 Each student to come and pick a random paper from a jar or a small box.
 The paper contains a sentence that he/she has to read it.
 The teacher and the students evaluate the reading and if the student deserve to
unwrap a layer.
 The student who urwraps the last layer will take the gift. And this is the only time
to present gifts in the strategy. The gift can be something symbolic like anotebook
or a pencil, the rest of the good readers who last till the end and have no chance to
unfold the gift will take rewards as well.

Game 3: Read your blog

 Each student to be given papers and decoration materials.

 He/She to express oneself by writing 5 sentences about theirslves.
 After all finish each student has to come nfront of the class and read his blog.
 The teacher and students will decide which is the niceiest blog and the best reader.

55
Game 4: Buy a flower

 The teacher writes some short paragraphs on pieces of papers.

 Those papers will be set on the back of every flowers in a basket.
 The seller goes round the class and sell flowers.
 The buyer will take a flower, read the paragraph.

56