Effectiveness of Phonological Remediation for Children with Poor English Word Reading Abilities

Abstract

We evaluated the effectiveness of two theoretically motivated remedial reading instruction programs and their impact on third-grade low achievers of English. In this two-year longitudinal study, 95 children who were poor at word recognition of English were divided into three matched groups and randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions, Phonics or Phonics with Phonological Awareness (PA), or to a control treatment condition with equal instructional time but without instruction in Phonics or PA. A group of no-treatment typically-achieving children was also included for comparison of the outcome measures. There were three semesters of intervention. Outcome measures (real word reading, pseudoword reading, and phonological awareness) were administered after each of the three semesters. The results indicated that there were no selective effects of treatment on word reading. However, at the conclusion of the intervention, children's word decoding ability improved as a result of treatment in phonics or phonics with PA and approached the level comparable to the typically-achieving children. Additional training in PA yielded a positive effect in promoting children's ranking in real word and pseudoword reading, though the training itself did not prove to be effective for its own purpose. No substantial training effect was obtained for the low achieving children who received the control treatment. Implications for the classroom and future research are also discussed.