In the USA, students arrive to kindergarten from highly variable experiences with formal learning [
1]. Experiences prior to kindergarten provide the building blocks of later achievement. Children missing critical early learning experiences begin school at a significant disadvantage [
2]. As early as kindergarten, the Common Core State Standards which guide many learning expectations in the United States, expects students to relate concepts to themselves and the world around them. This becomes a challenging task for students who do not have practice to be able to absorb and relate information from the text. These disadvantages continue into later grades. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics showed that Black and Hispanic students trailed their White peers by an average of more than 20 test-score points on the NAEP math and reading assessments at fourth and eighth grades, a difference of about two grade levels [
3,
4].
Fundamentally, students need to be able to learn and understand complex reading concepts. Practice is always needed to build these foundational skills, but it does not speed up comprehension or fluency improvement [
5]. In the USA, research has found instruction that is led by the teacher in a small group addressing specific needs, often 15 min per day, three to four days per week has meaningful impacts on student achievement [
6,
7]. Similarly, reading instruction in the early grades (K-3) most often includes a combination of independent reading practice, online reading practice (sometimes with application), and small or large group work in which reading is applied to various concepts and activities determined by the curriculum [
8]. With US students entering kindergarten at varying levels, the challenge of getting students to read at grade level can be even more difficult. More than ever, US teachers are expected to meet greater demands in their classrooms with a more diverse student population.
Supplemental programs aimed at filling reading gaps and raising achievement scores need to be easy to use for both students and teachers. Programs that save time, money, and work may be more readily adopted by teachers. If a program’s implementation requires significant amounts of teacher and student training, and extra materials, adoption may be difficult [
9,
10]. Recent advancements in technology position technological tools to be a cost-effective means to reduce these educational gaps [
11].
When used appropriately, technology creates access and equitability, supports relationships between educators and students, and provides individualized learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners. The conversation has shifted from whether technology should be used in classrooms to how it can be used to increase access and personalize learning. Access to technology has also made significant progress in terms of both high-speed connectivity and cost. While significant progress has been made in educational technology applications, a digital use divide continues to exist between learners who are using technology in active, creative ways to support their learning and those who predominantly use technology for passive content consumption. Lyrics2Learn (L2L) is a technology application that uses rhythm and music to teach reading fluency and has the promise to address the gaps in reading achievement. Additionally, L2L allows teachers to individualize learning with technology rather than provide a passive distraction in the classroom. The current paper explores the impact of L2L on student reading achievement. But first, we briefly review the research basis of L2L to ground the discussion.
1.1. Rhythm and Reading
Four foundational skills are widely accepted by US national standards as prerequisites for reading. These include print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency as they support the transformation of converting print into a meaningful linguistic code [
12]. In particular, fluency is important because it is considered a prerequisite for students to read and understand what they have read. Reading fluency has been defined as “reasonably accurate reading at an appropriate rate with proper prosody (the pitch, tone, volume, emphasis, rhythm of oral reading) that leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation to read” [
13]. Fluency is not the same as rate or speed, and having students learn to read as fast as possible will not increase their reading proficiency [
14]. Instead, fluency is considered a complex skill requiring accuracy and rate. Research has identified fluency as a critical goal in reading [
15,
16]. A fluent reader is reading with automaticity, in other words reading without having to think about it at a conscious level, leaving the brain to attend to the meaning of the text being read [
17].
Strategies similar to those used by L2L shown to increase fluency often focus on providing the reader opportunities to practice repeated readings. For example, ‘tape assisted reading’ which uses oral-assisted reading techniques, was found to increase reading fluency and overall reading achievement [
18,
19,
20]. Gains were also reported with tape assisted reading for students’ attitude toward reading and teachers’ ratings of student’s classroom reading performance [
21].
Furthermore, research on repeated readings of relatively brief texts such as poems have been shown to improve fluency [
22]. Poems are meant to be spoken aloud and are authentically read repeatedly as the reader rehearses their performance. Additionally, poems are rhythmical in nature supporting the development of prosody, a key component of fluency that is not often addressed in most fluency programs. In one recent study, students who received reading instruction, using poetry, made significantly greater gains in word recognition, fluency, and comprehension than they had previously been making in a more traditional school setting [
23]. Young and struggling readers may be motivated by the tempo, cadence, and sound of the poetry, providing the opportunity to learn vocabulary in meaningful and efficient ways.
Similar to poetry, songs naturally lend themselves to re-readings [
24]. Skills such as blending and segmenting sounds needed for music production are similarly used in language processing [
25]. Studies examining the use of music or lyrics and reading fluency have consistently shown positive results [
26,
27,
28,
29,
30]. Specific singing-integrated strategies, specifically the use of songs, may also enhance reading motivation [
31]. Adolescent students who heard repeated readings set to song and lyrics instead of regular passages showed greater gains in fluency as well as increased motivation for fluency activities [
27]. Additionally, when words of the text were familiar, such as favorite songs, children experienced more success in learning to read [
31]. Similarly, an intervention using popular children’s songs portrayed in picture books to teach fluency to third graders had positive impacts on automaticity [
32]. Automaticity as previously discussed is important to free up more cognitive energy necessary for reading comprehension [
33].
L2L builds off the research base of these foundational fluency programs and extends it further by using computer technology and readings set to music, to offer repeated reading opportunities as well as rapid feedback on performance to scaffold the student experience.
1.2. Lyrics2Learn (L2L) and Reading Fluency
Lyrics2learn (L2L) is an online reading application created by a veteran classroom teacher with 15 years of experience. L2L started with eight stories, broken up into 4–15 min activities used as a daily independent reading center while the teacher ran tiered reading groups. As previously stated, L2L is grounded in research on the benefits of music to engage students with text, make repeated reading fun, and help students memorize information quickly. Stories are repeated daily and set to rhythm and rhyme, increasing students’ retention of the information and their performance on question levels (aligned with the Common Core Depth of Knowledge levels (D.O.K) 1, 2, and 3). Over time, the first eight stories, ranging from the history of Abe Lincoln to learning about empathy, grew to over 200 original texts, organized into more than 800 activities. 50% of the stories are fiction, most of which teach students about character building with concepts and real-life examples of honesty, perspective, grit, and cooperation.
Although L2L is focused on reading improvement, teachers also integrate science, history and other subjects into reading with non-fiction texts. Each story, whether fiction or non-fiction, addresses fluency, literal comprehension (Day 1), inferential comprehension (Day 2), complex concepts stressing text-to-self and text-to-world connections (Day 3), and open ended short constructed response paragraphs requiring students to support their answers with examples from the text (
Figure 1).
Text written with rhythm, rhyme and simple melodies, makes fluency practice fun, multi-sensory and engaging. The monotonous (but time-tested and proven) fluency strategies of repeated and choral reading, suddenly become head-bopping sessions of reading and re-reading cool song lyrics until they are memorized.
Table 1 below presents how components of L2L support specific fluency skills.
Students read along with musicians three times each day. The words are ‘chunked’ or highlighted in phrasing groups to help students learn to track ahead as they read (
Figure 2). The music is intended to provoke emotion, and help kids feel and visualize events in the story.
In L2L’s first eight-week anecdotal study at the teacher-creator’s school, DIBELS fluency improvement rates went up 50–100%. None of these students decreased in their oral reading fluency (ORF) [
34]. The average gain was 20 words per minute (WPM), and the highest was a gain of 68 WPM. Students that had essentially flat-lined through the first 16-week semester were more engaged to complete lessons effectively and independently. In the classroom, teachers able to provide more instructional time to small groups during reading rotations.
Because the students memorize lyrics (both informational and fictional text) so quickly, they gain confidence in their ability to think through high level questioning. In short, kids read the same story three times each day, three days a week, and find repeated, choral reading fun and enjoyable. Each day, as rhythm and rhyme allow students to retain more of the text, the question level becomes more complex. Day 1 is literal, day two inferential, and Day 3 text-to-self and text-to-world connections. The last question of every story addresses open-ended critical thinking and constructed response.
Each day’s quiz allows students to check the text and is guided by “Lefty Lyric” who offers comprehension strategies and test taking skills related to the questions (
Figure 3).
L2L’s strategies and design were ultimately developed to address the gaps in reading achievement by supporting teachers to individualize learning with technology. To accomplish this, L2L builds off of the existing research base on music and reading fluency and extends it further by using computer assisted technology to offer repeated reading opportunities. Furthermore, L2L’s technology offer rapid feedback on performance to scaffold the student experience.