The Effects of an On-line Reading Intervention on the Development of English Decoding Skills among Moroccan Adult Struggling Readers

Abstract

The present study examines the role of an intensive phonics-based online reading program in developing decoding skills among a group of low-intermediate adult learners. All the participants taking part in this experiment are defined as low-level, or struggling, readers. A lexical-decision task is administered to a total of twenty-four students divided into two main groups: treatment and control groups. The administration of the computer-based test is twofold and is done over two main phases: pre- and post-intervention. The online reading intervention, which is tailored to cover English orthographic knowledge and sound processing of high and low frequency words, is exclusively designed for the experimental group for four weeks. The intervention group demonstrates a significant improvement in spelling skills, reading speed and phoneme awareness. The results, on the one hand, suggest the importance of L2 print exposure which fosters phonological processing skills. On the other hand, the findings show that word identification processes operate at a pre-lexical access stage and are rudimentary to recognize and activate a lexical item.