Promoting Foundation Reading Skills With At-Risk Students.

Ana Sucena,Cátia Marques,Ana Filipa Silva

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.671733

Abstract

This paper presents an early reading intervention program, the PPCL (Programa de Promoção das Competências Leitoras—Promoting Reading Skills Program). PPCL focuses on the promotion of reading foundation abilities—letter-sound, phonemic awareness, decoding, and spelling—with at-risk first graders. This study assessed the impact of PPCL on the reading foundation abilities with 311 first graders (173 boys and 138 girls), divided between intervention and comparative group (respectively, 206 and 105 first graders). Results were analyzed with an inter- (intervention and comparative group) and intra- (pre-and post-test) group design. A mixed two-way Manova indicated the presence of statistically significant differences between the two assessment moments, with the intervention group presenting higher values than the comparative group in all abilities at the post-test and also above the cutoff score in all variables, which indicates that at-risk students eventually concluded the school year with satisfactory levels of reading skills. On the other hand, the comparative group scored below the cutoff score in all variables. The magnitude of the effect on the intervention group was higher than the one observed in the comparative group. Reading promotion with PPCL significantly improved at-risk students reading skills. In future studies, the authors intend to follow up on reading and writing participants’ skills.

Highlights

Reading and writing are indispensable skills, of crucial importance for equal opportunities (Blomert and Froyen, 2010)
It is of major importance to identify them as being at risk of developing learning difficulties and beginning a systematic intervention. These findings provide the theoretical motivation for early reading intervention programs (Hatcher et al, 2006; Suggate, 2016)
At the post-test, the intervention group performed (i) better than the comparative group, both on pre-reading and reading skills, and (ii) above the critical value in all variables, whereas the comparative group scored below the critical value

Summary

Introduction

Reading and writing are indispensable skills, of crucial importance for equal opportunities (Blomert and Froyen, 2010). Impairments in reading and writing acquisition skills can seriously limit personal aspirations (Jeffes, 2016; Jamshidifarsani et al, 2019). Reading and writing acquisition are based on the learning rhythm, which is associated with the characteristics of the orthography in which the child acquires reading. The less transparent an orthography is, the greater the likelihood for children to experience difficulties, especially in the initial phase of reading acquisition. European Portuguese is considered an intermediate orthography allowing children to develop the reading foundations at a faster pace and experiencing fewer difficulties than English children for example (Sucena et al, 2009; Ziegler et al, 2010). As a result of the inconsistencies between graphemes and phonemes English speaking children need a longer learning period (two times longer) to acquire the reading foundations (Seymour et al, 2003).

Objectives

Results

Conclusion