Improving children’s reading through the Fleming Effective Teaching Model

This study explored the outcomes of children’s reading development when taught using the Fleming Effective Teaching Model at an independent school in Melbourne, Australia. Reading has been identified as a major difficulty facing children in Australian schools. Several attempts have been made by educators to find a better way of teaching reading to young readers and this study contributes to this endeavor. A mixed-method approach has been used to collect data including qualitative and quantitative data. Specifically, it looks at the explicit instruction of letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make as well as exploring the explicit instruction of reading decoding skills such as the blending, segmenting and chunking of letters, graphs and digraphs to decipher their meaning. There is also a focus on learning about the perceptions parents have on their child’s reading abilities. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory has been used as the theoretical framework to analyse and interpret the findings of this study. The outcomes of this research indicate that the Fleming Effective Teaching model has a significantly positive influence on young children when they are emergent readers. A steep improvement was noticed in children’s ability to recognize letters and then furthermore apply these skills into the context of a text appropriately. The parents who were interviewed in this study expressed a strong indication in their personal beliefs that the relationships and interactions between children and families as well as children and teachers were key contributing factors to children’s reading outcomes. Based on these findings recommendations for future research have been made as we work towards unravelling the phenomena that is learning to read.