This study aimed to determine the effects of nursery rhymes, entertaining and prominent products of Turkish folk literature, on improving reading fluency of fourth-grade primary school students. The sample consisted of 44 fourth graders, attending a public primary school in Vakfikebir County of Trabzon province (Turkey) in the 2015-2016 academic…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

Nine infants with Down's syndrome, seven nonhandicapped infants, and one severely handicapped infant were given the choice of listening to familiar nursery rhymes or to the same rhymes with each word reversed so that the rhythms, intonation and stress patterns were kept intact but the words became nonsense. (RH)

Compares the effectiveness of two approaches for teaching basic sight words to educable mentally handicapped students: (1) using the Language Experience Approach (LEA) alone; and (2) using LEA with nursery rhymes. Finds the subjects learned words more easily and rapidly when using nursery rhymes. (RS)