Abstract:
The mastery of any language depends on mastery of listening, speaking, reading and writing. While listening and speaking comes naturally to the students, reading is specialized skill that needs concentrated efforts both on the part of the teacher and the taught. The components involved in reading are pronunciation, fluency, comprehension and spelling recognition. Research suggests a tested approach to improve reading comprehension levels significantly by using audio formats of the text books (Whittingham, Huffman, Christensen and McAllister, 2013). However the researcher was of the view that providing text both in audio and video format would further improve the reading ability of the students. No such efforts have been made in the near past where the text has been provided both in the audio and video format. Moreover current ICT tool and technologies have greatly made it possible to use such an approach in all classrooms. The present paper is an account of an experiment done in. a CBSE primary school. It includes the strategy to improve the reading ability of the students by converting the NCERT primary level textbooks into audio and video format using JCT tools and measuring its effectiveness on the reading and over all achievement of the students.The objectives of the present experimental study were to study the effectiveness of providing NCERT primary level textbooks in audio and video format on the students' reading ability, overall achievement, pronunciation, comprehension, language fluency and spelling. Sample consisting of seventy students of Class-IV for the session 2016-17 were divided into two groups of 35 students each. One group was randomly chosen as the experimental group and the other as the control group. The tool includes the rubrics provided by CBSE to evaluate the reading ability of the students based on their performance on Pronunciation, Fluency, Comprehension and Spelling. The final examination marks was taken as academic achievement. The findings revealed that providing textbooks in audio and video format enhanced students' academic achievement, reading ability, pronunciation, fluency and comprehension and had no influence on spelling.
