The effects of combined shared reading and preview-review methods on students speaking proficiency

This experimental research was carried out in an attempt to identify any possible positive effects of two Reading Aloud methods namely ‘Shared Reading’ (Holdaway, 1979) and ‘Preview-Review’ (Ulanoff dan Pucci, 1994) on form six students’ speaking proficiency in English. The selected students were from a rural secondary school in Perlis. At the beginning, students’ levels of speaking proficiency were determined based on their SPM results. The purpose of combining the methods was to scaffold students towards understanding the content and vocabulary in the selected reading texts so that they can be applied in the speaking session during the lesson. The data from the pre-test and post-test collected in this study were analyzed using SPSS software. The effectiveness of the methods implemented was determined by comparing the mean differences of the pre-test and the post-test scores between the two groups involved (Experimental Group and Control Group). The results indicate significant differences between the pre-test and the post-test mean scores for ‘task fulfilment’, ‘language use’, and ‘communicative ability’ for the Experimental Group, whereas there is no significant difference in the mean scores for the same categories between the pre-test and post-test for the Control Group. Overall, the analyzed data demonstrates that, the implementation of ‘Shared Reading’ and ‘Preview-Review’ methods have significantly improved the Experimental Group’s speaking proficiency. Therefore these combined methods can be suggested as one of the ways to teach speaking to second language students.