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Abstract
In an effort to determine whether improvement in the oral language grammatical patterns of EMH adolescents would result in significant improvement in reading fluency, written expression and listening ability, a modified cloze procedure was used to teach the correct usage of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives in 24 training sessions spread over an eight week period. Twenty-seven junior high school students were involved, 13 in the experimental group and 14 in the control group. Both groups were given pretests in oral language, reading fluency, written expression and listening ability. These measures were repeated following the training sessions as a posttest and again 4 weeks later as a follow-up test. The data were analyzed by means of a split-plot, repeated measures design. Each of the dependent variables was subjected to univariate analysis of variance procedures. F tests were calculated for comparison of the means and also to determine if there were nonparallel trends across time for the dependent variables. In addition, a correlation matrix was developed to determine if there was a relationship among the four dependent variables.
It was hypothesized that the means of the experimental group would be significantly greater than the means of the control group on the four language factors. It was also hypothesized that there would be high correlation coefficients among these language factors.
With the exception of the significant improvement of all the subjects as a group on the reading fluency and listening ability factors over time, the results of the statistical tests on the group means were nonsignificant. The highest correlation coefficients were found between the reading fluency and the written expression factors. Possible reasons for these findings and their implications for special education programs are discussed as well as recommendations for future research.
