The Islamic University- Gaza Deanery of Higher Education Faculty of ...

Under the same umbrella, Podhajski et al., (2009) conducted a study to examine theeffects of a training programme in scientifically based reading instruction on teachers'knowledge and students' reading outcomes. The programme was entitled “TIME” -Acronymfor-Training in Instructional Methods of Efficacy-. The 35 hours programme focused ontraining first and second grade teachers on the teaching phonemic awareness, phonics andfluency. It also helped teachers to investigate how English language is constructed and toexperience explicit and implicit strategies of teaching phonics, phonemes and readingassessment as well. The study was of experimental nature involving an experimental group of4 teachers and their 33 students compared with a control group of 3 teachers and their 14students. A pre-post test was used to investigate the programme impact on teachers‟knowledge concerning explicit reading instruction and the impact of this knowledge onstudents reading achievements. Test scores reported positive effects of the programme onboth teacher knowledge and students‟ growth in reading. The researchers concluded thateffective programmes which enhance teachers‟ knowledges in specific skills can have apositive effect on teachers and students learning outcomes practices (2009, p.414).A fifth evaluative study which yielded a positive impact on teachers' practices andstudents' performance as a result of participatingin a training programme is the oneconducted by Biggs et al., (2008). The main purpose of this study was to investigate theeffects of the training programme on teachers‟ use of new instructional methodology entitled"Sheltered Instruction". The programme started with interviewing participating teachers andobserving their classes twice in 2004. The data collected in this pre-stage were used indesigning the 45 training hours with the focus on using sheltered instruction with ELLS. Thestudy involved 23 teachers from the same elementary school with their students. Datacollection was mainly done through structured interviews and focused classroom observation.Result analysis showed that this focused individualized programme resulted in positive- 77 -