Evaluation of the Buddy Reading programme

Shegar, C. (2009). Buddy Reading in a Singaporean primary school: Implications for training and research. RELC Journal, 40(2), 133-148.

Background

Buddy Reading, a peer tutoring programme aimed at improving reading performance, has been widely adopted in primary schools in Singapore. Although this programme is believed to help promote struggling readers’ reading accuracy and confidence when reading independently, there is no fixed procedure on how Buddy Reading should be conducted. Different reading activities (e.g., silent reading, simultaneous reading, follow-up discussion) have been observed to take place during the programme.

Aims

The study took place in a primary school in Singapore. The author sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’ method, a development in Buddy Reading which sets out a standard procedure for tutor response to the oral reading behaviour of the tutee during the reading sessions. The study also aimed to investigate if prolonged training of child tutors would lead to effective peer tutoring during Buddy Reading.

Sample

Eight pairs of buddies were involved. Each pair was made up of one eight year oldproficient reader (tutor) and one seven year old struggling reader (tutee).

Method

This study adopted a pre-post research design in which child tutors were trained, over a period of three weeks, to use the ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’ technique. All eight pairs of buddies were observed before and after the training programme. Recordings of the reading sessions were transcribed and analysed using a coding instrument designed to help track the number of instances when (1) there was a need to apply ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’, (2) any component of ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’ was used, and (3) different kinds of prompts were employed.

Findings

Results showed that the child tutors were generally better able to appropriate the technique after the training sessions. Training also resulted in the consistent use of ‘Pause and Prompt’ for the majority of the tutors. Instead of restricting themselves to phonetic and semantic prompts, tutors also made use of the more difficult syntactic prompts. Likewise, tutors were more inclined to ask generic global comprehension questions than local comprehension questions. However, the ‘Praise’ skill was rarely employed.

Implications

Findings suggested that children have the potential to be as effective as older peers in peer tutoring programmes if given comprehensive and elaborate training. Future training programmes should include proper scaffolding of the training of tutors, close monitoring of their performance, provision of feedback during the reading sessions, and a checklist that clearly delineates the procedures for tutorship.

Original article retrieved from Sage Journals.