Improving the Oral Reading Fluency of Grade 11 Students With Reading Difficulties Through Visual–Auditory–Kinesthetic (VAK) and Rhythmic Approaches

This study examined two instructional approaches—the visual–auditory–kinesthetic (VAK) approach and the rhythmic approach—as supports for the oral reading fluency (ORF) of Grade 11 students in a public senior high school in El Salvador City, Misamis Oriental, Philippines. Anchored on Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory and LaBerge and Samuels’ Automaticity Theory, the study asked whether structured, stimulus-rich activities are associated with gains in reading performance. A quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design without a control condition was used; ORF was indexed by word-recognition accuracy on the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (PHIL-IRI), the Department of Education’s standard reading-level measure. Sixty-five students identified through screening as performing below the independent level (instructional or frustration) were assigned to the VAK group (n = 30) or the rhythmic group (n = 35). Both interventions ran for six weeks at three sessions per week. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, paired-samples t-tests, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Before the interventions, most participants performed at the instructional level, with several at the frustration level; afterward, the majority in both groups reached the independent level, none remained at the frustration level, and group means moved into the independent band. Paired-samples t-tests revealed significant pre–post gains within each group (VAK: t = –10.08, p < .01, d = 1.84; rhythmic: t = –11.82, p < .01, d = 2.00), and ANCOVA showed no statistically significant difference between groups, F(1, 62) = 0.068, p = .795, partial η² = .001. These within-group effect sizes are large but should be read cautiously: in a single-group design, maturation, repeated testing, and regression to the mean cannot be ruled out, so the interventions cannot be credited as the sole cause of the gains. The non-significant between-group result indicates no detectable difference rather than confirmed equivalence, especially because posttest scores approached the ceiling of the accuracy measure. Within these limits, both approaches were associated with meaningful improvement in word-recognition accuracy and offer teachers low-cost, classroom-feasible strategies that merit confirmation in controlled studies measuring rate and prosody.