Corrective Feedback of Oral Decoding Errors for Diverse Learners with Reading Disabilities: the Effects of Two Methods on Reading Fluency

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two corrective feedback methods, word-supply and phonics-based, on the oral reading fluency of students with mild disabilities. The participants included three students in the fourth grade who were diagnosed with a Specific Learning Disability (SLD) or Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorder (EBD). A single subject modified parallel treatments design (Alberto & Troutman, 2008) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the two types of feedback methods (e.g., word-supply and phonics-based) on the students oral reading fluency skills. In the word-supply condition, students were provided the whole word upon a miscue, while in the phonics-based condition students were provided the word phoneme-by-phoneme in a sounded-out fashion. Feedback procedures were implemented upon the occurrence of word miscues during the oral reading. Dependent measures included the number of correct words per minute, recorded as a rate on individual passages taken from leveled readers. Results of the fluency data collected on the errors corrected using either the word-supply or phonics-based feedback method revealed that the word-supply feedback condition was slightly superior for two of the three students.