Effectivenes of oral repated reading on the fluency and comprehension in English of children with autism (CWA)

The study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of oral repeated reading on children with autism while teaching English. Its findings might serve a basis for the development of reading instructional materials in English and help English teachers prepare related lesson plans for such in paired students. According to the Autism Society of America (ASA; 2006), autism is the fastest growing developmental disability with projected annual growth of 10% to 17%. Every day the number of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is increasing and most of them have the chance neither to have a special education nor to learn English. What's more, most of them should go on studying with the other normal students in public schools. The researcher only ventured to study 3 male student respondents enrolled in Kütahya Şehitler Primary School who were medically diagnosed with autism with speech disfluencies and learning / reading comprehension problem. These students have been diagnosed as mild autism children by paediatricians and the students were aged between 8, 9 and 8 respectively. The researcher combined Dolch Sight Word Test (1948) and the Woodcock – Johnson Test to measure learning and reading abilities of these CWA. It was aimed to evaluate students' cognitive processes as well as their reading performance. Developed by the researcher specifically for the present study, this informal measurement technique can assess the students' comprehension, vocabulary and word identification skills in English. The results were calculated by the Word Recognition (WR) test formula and displayed on tables in percentages. Finally, to determine CWA's reading levels Gickling and Armstrong measuring technique was used. Test results of the study showed that oral repeated reading technique can be effectively used with students with autism to increase their reading fluency and comprehension of the vocabulary in English and as an intervention to increase overall fluency. Keywords: CWA, Oral Reading Repetition, Reading Fluency, Language Learning