Abstract

Many researches have been conducted home and abroad to investigate the relationship between students’ oral reading fluency and their reading comprehension ability. This relationship has been confirmed by a lot of researches. However, gender differences haven’t been taken into consideration. Since oral reading fluency can help students improve their reading comprehension to some extent, it is necessary to look at the correlation in boys and girls respectively in order to provide gender-based suggestions. The aim of this study is to figure out whether the degree of correlation in boys and girls are the same or not. 

The participants, with similar level of the mastery of English, come from 5 different classes, with 4 boys and 4 girls in each class. Provided with the reading passages, they are supposed to finish the tasks of oral reading recording and reading comprehension following each passage. After five days, all the data have been collected and analyzed. 

The results show that girls have a closer relationship between their oral reading fluency and reading comprehension ability than boys. Based on the main finding, some suggestions are put forward for middle school students to improve their reading comprehension ability. 

Keywords: relationship; oral reading fluency; reading comprehension ability; gender differences

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 The Definition and Importance of Reading-2

2.2 Researches on the Relationship between Students’Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension Ability-3

2.3 Studies on the Differences between Boys and Girls in terms of Learning English-4

3. Methodology-5

3.1 Research Questions-5

3.2 Participants-5

3.3 Instruments and Procedures-5

3.3.1 The Analysis of Oral Reading Fluency-5

3.3.2 The Analysis of Reading Comprehension-6

3.3.3 Procedures-6

4. Results and Data Analysis-8

4.1 The Analysis of the Participants’ Performance in Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension Tasks.-8

4.1.1 Performance in Oral Reading Fluency-9

4.1.2 Performance in Reading Comprehension-9

4.2 The Analysis of the Relationship between Middle School Boys’ and Girls’ Oral Reading Fluency and Their Reading Comprehension Ability.-10

4.2.1 The Similarity-10

4.2.2 The Differentia-11

5. Conclusion-13

5.1 Major Findings-13

5.2 Suggestions-13

5.3 Limitations-14

References-15

Appendix-17