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Abstract
This study compared the effectiveness of two reading interventions in a public school setting. Forty-five second-grade children with reading disabilities were randomly assigned to a 6-week phonological awareness, word analogy or math-training program. The two reading interventions differed from each other in (a) the unit of word analysis (phoneme versus onset-rime), (b) the approach to intervention (contextualized versus decontextualized), and (c) the primary domain of reading instruction (oral versus written language). Results indicate that children in both reading programs achieved significant gains in beginning reading skills, learning the specific skills taught in their respective programs, and applying what they had learned to uninstructed material on several transfer-of-learning measures, in comparison to children in the control group. For children in both reading intervention groups, the most significant mediator of growth in oral reading fluency was a child's initial level of word identification skill. Implications of these findings are that systematic, high quality reading intervention can occur in a small group, public school setting and that there are several different paths to the remediation of children with reading disabilities.
It is now widely accepted that the primary cause of reading disability for a majority of children lies in phonological processing inefficiencies that interfere with the development of phonological skills, such as phoneme segmentation, verbal memory, and name retrieval (e.g., Adams, 1990; Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989; Siegel, 1993; Stanovich, 1988; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; Vellutino, 1979; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Moreover, this has been shown to be true for children whose poor reading is discrepant from their IQ and for children whose poor reading is consistent with their IQ (e.g., Fletcher et al., 1994; Manis, Custodio, & Szeszulski, 1993; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994).
An understanding of the etiology of reading disability has enabled researchers to determine how inefficient phonological processing skills hinder the development of early literacy skills. For example, recent research has revealed that children at risk for reading failure, whether or not they have identifiable learning disabilities, have difficulty understanding and applying the "alphabet principle"-the concept that the sounds of speech map onto the letters of the alphabet (Adams, 1990; Lovett, Warren-Chaplin, Ransby, & Borden, 1990; Stanovich & Siegel,1994; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). Knowledge of the alphabet principle, in turn,...