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Reading disability (RD) has been defined as the failure to reach grade specific reading level despite normal sensory abilities, educational and emotional background, and intelligence (Wise and Olsen, 1991). It has been hypothesized by several researchers that the core of RD is a deficit in all aspects of word recognition such as phonemic awareness, alphabetic mapping, and phonetic decoding (Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987, Stanovich, 1989). Others have hypothesized that RD children may also lack knowledge of, and the ability to apply strategies to maximize their reading skill (Lovett, Borden, DeLuca, Lacerenza, Benson, & Brackstone, 1994). Others have hypothesized that a deficit in rule based knowledge may account for some reading disabilities (Benson, Lovett, & Kroeber, 1993, Manis, F. R., & Morrison, F. J.,1985). Given these assumptions, instruction to remediate reading difficulties in children should contain material to cover each of the possible deficits.

Phonological and Strategies Training

Lovett et. al.(1994) conducted a study which measured the effectiveness of remediation strategies for RD children between 7 and 13 years of age which taught strategies for phonological decoding of words through direct instruction to one group, and taught metacognitive strategies for decoding of words to another group. Training took place four days per week for 35 one hour sessions. Phonological analysis and blending/ direct instruction (PHAB/DI) involved teaching children letter-sound and letter-cluster-sound correspondences. Materials and methods of teaching were based on Engelmann's work with the Reading Mastery Fast Cycle I/II Program. The special orthography highlights salient features of many letters and provides visual cues such as symbols over the long vowels (macrons), letter size variation , and connected letters, and was used to facilitate learning. Through direct instruction, materials were introduced in a carefully graduated sequence of steps, with many opportunities for overlearning of content and skills. The major focus was on word segmentation and blending, which are considered prerequisite skills for word identification learning.

The Word Identification Strategy Training (WIST) consisted of training RD children in the acquisition, use, and monitoring of effective word identification strategies. These strategies were based on work by Gaskins and the Benchmark Program. Four strategies were taught:

1) Word identification by analogy-- which taught children to compare an unfamiliar word with one already known (from a list of keywords).(eg. kick and her in the word bicker)

2) Vowel variation--which taught children to attempt alternate pronunciations for vowels until they came up with a real word that was part of their vocabulary. (eg. for the word find the child would first try the short variation of the vowel to find it did not result in a real word, then try the long variation which would result in a real word.

3) Seek the part you know--which taught children to identify segments of unfamiliar words that were smaller words that they already knew. (eg. identifying bun and dan in the word abundance)

4) Peeling off.--which taught children to separate affixes at the beginning and end of a word, reducing the unfamiliar word to a smaller root word.(eg. Un and ing would be peeled off for the word unpacking)

When compared to a group of RD children who took a Classroom Survival Skills (CSS) course, performance on all measures of content learning, phonological processing, and transfer were superior for the experimental groups. It was noted that children who had participated in the PHAB/DI program performed better on post-test tasks requiring phonetic processing than other groups, and children who participated in the WIST program performed better on post-test tasks requiring whole word processing. It was concluded that RD is remediable and that a combination of both phonetic and whole word instruction are necessary for an effective remediation program. Further research needs to be conducted using these programs in mainstream classrooms to determine the possibility of introducing them into the core curriculum.

Reading Recovery

Another program that has produced promising results is the Reading Recovery program (Englisch & Syer, 1992). This program is designed to teach grade one children at risk of failing because of reading difficulty, effective strategies for reading and writing. Children receive holistic instruction in reading and writing, which act to supplement classroom teaching, in 30 minute daily sessions over the course of 12 to 15 weeks. The first two weeks of the program is called Roaming around the Known, in which the teacher observes the child's ways of learning and a rapport is developed between teacher and student. Each child receives individualized instruction based on their strengths and needs. The child selects and rereads two or three little books which s/he has read successfully. After reading the teacher selects one or two teaching points that s/he feels are most productive, allowing observation of the child's use of reading strategies. The children learn to analyse words through the use of personal messages, composed based on read material; they learn to think, monitor, predict, confirm, and understand what they read. The teacher rewrites the messages and breaks them down into words and phrases allowing children to examine the details of written language within a meaningful context. New materials of increasing difficulty are introduced daily of which the teacher presents aspects of text such as the main idea and the language used.

A large part of the success of the program results from the extensive training Reading Recovery teachers receive. Over a year long postgraduate program, teachers attend a summer training session to learn how to administer and analyse results, attend weekly staff development meetings and perform preservice instruction for practice, and observe experienced teachers teaching Reading Recovery from behind a one-way glass. They learn to teach parents and classroom teachers the components of the program and stress the importance of their involvement. Teachers in training discuss the aspects of observed lessons in order to sensitize themselves to the features of the program.

New Zealand research indicates that after receiving the Reading Recovery program for 12 to 16 weeks (no articles sited), children had equalled the progress of their peers and needed no further intervention. After three years the children continued to make average progress.

Results from the first two years of a Canadian study indicate similar results, though third year results were hampered by attrition.

The success of the program has lead to its introduction as a nationwide program in NewZealand, and in Australia, England, and 42 states in the U. S. In Canada 55 Reading Recovery programs have been implemented in Scarborough with a view to system wide implementation by the mid 1990s (as of the fall of 1999 this implementation has not occurred).

Future Reading Programs

Research indicates that RD children may lack rule based knowledge specific to written text (Benson et.al, 1993). Others have suggested that the deficit in rule based knowledge is global, applying to areas other than reading (Manis & Morrison, 1985).The Benson et. al. study assessed the specificity of training and transfer deficits in RD children aged 7 to 9. In a reading level match design they found that RD children instructed in a 45 minute training session made comparable gains to normal controls but more significant gains than the reading level matched controls in their acquisition and transfer of rule based knowledge related to music (ie. symbol-note correspondence, eg. dropping the final note when it was preceded by middle C, conducted with illustrative pictures). But, they were significantly less successful for rule based knowledge of reading related material (ie. grapheme-phoneme correspondence, eg. drop the B when it follows an M, as in lamb, conducted with the identical illustrative pictures used in the music task but with words instead of symbols) when applied to new words in a post-test situation one day and one week after the training session. Normal controls and reading level match controls were significantly more successful with the reading task than the RD group. These results suggest that training and transfer-of-learning deficits of the RD population may be specific to processes of learning involving printed words, print-to-speech translation, and/or segmenting and blending of individual speech sounds.

In light of this study, teaching rule based knowledge of word construction may be another feature of effective reading remediation, to be added to the phonological and strategies training of PHAB/DI and WIST, and the holistic approach of Reading Recovery. It is evident that reading failure can be aborted if appropriate remediation is introduced early. The challenge now is to select the strengths from each of the approaches discussed here and combine them into a program that will help RD children keep up academically.

References

Benson, N. J., Lovett, M. W., & Kroeber, C. L.(1993) Training and transfer-of-learning effects in disabled and normal readers: Evidence of specific deficits. Poster presented at the Society for Research in child development, 1993 biennial meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Englicsh, M. & Syer, M.(1992). Reading Recovery: Making a difference before children fail. FWTAO Newsletter, October/November, 58-62.

Lovett, M. W., Borden, S.L., DeLuca, T., Lacerenza, L., Benson, N. J., and Blackstone, D. (1994). Treating the core deficits of developmental dyslexia: Evidence of transfer of learning after phonological and strategy-based reading training programs. Developmental Psychology, 30 (6), 805-822.

Manis, F.R. and Morrison, F. J.(1985). Reading disability: A deficit in rule learning? In L. Siegel & F. J. Morrison (Eds), Cognitive development in atypical children (pp.1-26). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Stanovich, K. (1989). Explaining the difference between the dyslexic and the garden-variety poor reader: The phonological-core variable-difference model. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 21 (10), 590-604.

Vellutino, F. R. & Scanlon, D. M. (1987). Phonological coding, phonological awareness, and reading ability: Evidence from a longitudinal and experimental study. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 33 (3), 321-363.

Wise, B. W. & Olsen, R. K. (1991). Remediating reading disabilities. In J. E. Obrzut & G. W. Hynds (Eds), Neuropsychological foundations of learning disabilities: A handbook of issues, methods and practice (pp. 631-658). Sandiego: Academic Press.