Center for Research on Reading Fluency

The British Journal of Psychiatry 132: 361-367 (1978)
© 1978 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

Familial nature of reading disability

JC DeFries, SM Singer, TT Foch and FI Lewitter

An extensive psychometric test battery was administered to 125 children with a reading disability, to their parents and siblings, and to members of 125 matched control familes (N = 1,044). In addition to expected differences in spelling and reading, probands obtained significantly (P less than or equal to .01) lower scores than controls on tests of other cognitive abilities. Manifold deficits were also found in siblings and parents of probands, conclusively demonstrating the familial (genetic and/or common-family environmental) nature of the disorder.

Word Fluency and Comprehension Training as an Alternative Intervention for Reading Disabled and Poor Readers

James M. Royer (Royer@psych.umass.edu), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

In Dr. Royer’s lab (LATAS), 56 students (in grades 3 – 9) with a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and 29 students identified as poor readers received training in “naming words as fast as possible while trying to be accurate.” Alls students were referred to LATAS because they had not responded to phonics-based interventions. In an initial assessment session, participants’ speed and accuracy were measured on a simple perception task, a letter naming task, a word naming task, a pseudoword naming task, a word meaning task, a sentence understanding task, and listening and reading comprehension tasks.

During the intervention, which lasted 8 weeks, participants practiced naming 4 pages of 40 words rapidly, with 10 words presented on a single page. Participants were given feedback only on the accuracy of the words named; training did not involve any instruction of the meaning of words. Following weeks 4 and 8 children were retested on the alternative forms of the initial screening assessments. The selection of the words were made on the basis of each child’s initial screening assessment and his/her educational background. The time to finish reading a page and number of errors were recorded and averaged (over 4 pages).

The results indicated that both the disabled and non-disabled groups “made considerable progress over the 8 weeks of intervention.”

Both the disabled and the non-disabled groups improved on the word and sentence understanding tasks, with both groups’ scores consistently increasing from screen to posttest. On non-word and category (word meaning) tasks, the improvements were less consistent. While the non-disabled readers were performing above average on the non-word reading task, the disabled readers’ improvement seemed to have stalled at week 4. The opposite pattern was observed on the category task: the disabled readers improved consistent improvements throughout the trainign; however, the non-disabled readers reached a plateau at Week 4.

The findings are significant in that “treatment-resistors” made gains in word, non-word and sentence reading through a word-naming fluency intervention.

Phonological, Reading and Writing Remediation Program in Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Cintia Alves Salgado (cintia_salgado@yahoo.com) & Dr. Sylvia Maria Ciasca
Laboratory of Learning Disabilities and Attention Disorder–DISAPRE
Department of Neurology/Universidade Estadual de Campinas–UNICAMP/SP, BRASIL

Thirty-two (32) children enrolled in public and private schools participated in the intervention, with the participants’ ages ranging from 9 to 14. The kids either were referred by their parents or had formal diagnosis of dyslexia.  The participants were randomly assigned to a Training Group (n=17) or a Control Group (n= 15).

The intervention consisted of three stages: (a) pretesting, (b) training, and (c) post-testing. During testing, participants were administered (a) Phonological Awareness, (b) Rapid Automatized Naming, (c) Verbal Evaluation of Level and Speed of Reading, and (d) Test of Reading and Writing. The testing data were collected over two sessions at both pre- and post-test.

Training consisted of (a) phonological processing, (b) verbal reading and understanding, and (c) dictation delivered in 24 one-hour sessions. For training in phonological processing, the PREFON program was used to present auditory discrimination activities, syllabic and phonemic manipulation, rhymes and alliteration, letter and phoneme identification, rapid naming, visual discrimination, and auditory and visual memory. Participants engaged in silent reading of phrases and larger textual discourse (texts and books in Portuguese) for training in verbal reading and understanding. Finally, a thematic writing activity constituted the dictation component of the training in which participants wrote to dictation words, phrases, and sentences.

The Control Group was not subjected to any component of the intervention presented to the Training Group–although it is not specified what exactly they did throughout the study.

Results yielded evidence for the effectiveness of the intervention program (the Phonological, Reading & Writing Remediatin Program) in children with developmental dyslexia, thereby corroborating earlier findings that remediation of this sort improves the cognitive and linguistic performance of children with dyslexia.

Ehri and Rosenthal (2007)* have demonstrated that spelling plays a crucial role in learning rare vocabulary words. A group of 2nd- and 5th-graders participated in study trials where they were shown a drawing of a rare word, heard its pronunciation, and were given its meaning in the context of example sentences. The presentation of the spelling was manipulated such that the drawings were accompanied by the spelling of the words for one group of 2nd-graders and one group of 5th-graders whereas no spellings were shown to another group of 2nd-grade and 5th-grade students.

Students were tested on their recall of the pronunciations and the meanings of the words after the initial study trial; the test trials continued with feedback until a criterion or a maximum number of trials was reached.

The results showed a clear advantage to students in the spelling-present condition over students in the spelling-absent condition. In other words, students who were shown the spellings of words recalled the pronunciation, meaning, and spelling of words with better accuracy than the students who did not see the spellings. Moreover, students (5th-graders) with a stronger grasp of English grapho-phonemic system exhibited stronger effects than those with a weaker hold of the decoding rules in English.

In a study with 2nd- and 6th-graders, West et al (1983) found students’ naming of target words to be facilitated by congrous contexts (1 or 3 sentences) preceding the word as opposed to neutral and incongruous contexts. The context effect was larger for 2nd-graders.

LaBerge and Samuels’ (1974) automaticity model: sub-processes of a complex process (i.e., reading, driving, playing the piano, etc) are to be executed automatically for the attention to be reallocated to the performance of the higher level task. Because the successful execution of the higher level process is predicated on the automatic coordination of the lower level processes, the model is presumed to be serial in nature.

Posner and Snyder (1975a, 1975b) identify two processes that affect fluent reading of texts in their theory of expectancy: (a)  the automatic-activation process, by which the memory activation of stimulus is attention free and (b) the conscious-attention mechanism, in which stimulus activation is a result of an effortful process (e.g., Leu, DeGroff,&Simons, 1986; Stanovich&Stanovich, 1995; West, Stanovich, Feeman, & Cunningham, 1983).

I did my dissertation research on the training effects of fluency instruction in a group of college readers who were demonstrably low in reading achievement. After teaching struggling college readers for a number of years, I was convinced that these students needed fluency instruction before they could achieve grade-level reading ability. Low verbal ability and disinterest in reading were observations typically shared by my colleagues teaching the sections of the same class.

Intrigued by the recent research findings, I also sought to investigate the relative efficacy of types of fluency instruction (i.e., repeated vs. continous reading) in a pretest-posttest, treatment-control design.

Below is the dissertation abstract detailing the study and findings:

Fluency instruction has had limited effects on reading comprehension relative to reading rate and prosodic reading (Dowhower, 1987; Herman, 1985; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). More specific components (i.e., error detection) of comprehension may yield larger effects through exposure to a wider range of materials than repeated readings (Kuhn, 2005). Thirty-three students reading below college level were randomly assigned to a Repeated Readings (RR), a Wide Reading (WR), or a Vocabulary Study (VS) condition and received training in 9 sessions of 30 minutes in a Southeast community college. RR students read an instructional-level text consecutively four times before answering comprehension questions about it; WR students read four instructional-level texts each once and answered questions while the VS group studied and took a quiz on academic vocabulary. An additional 13 students reading at college level provided comparison data.

At pretest, all participants completed the Nelson Denny Reading Test, Test of Word Reading Efficiency, Error Detection task (Albrecht & O’Brien, 1993), working memory test, Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI; Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002), a maze test, Author Recognition Test (ART), and reading survey. All pretest measures except for the ART and reading surveys were re-administered at posttest to training groups.

Paired-samples t-test analyses revealed (a) significant gains for the WR condition in vocabulary (p= .043), silent reading rate (p<.05), maze (p<.05) and working memory (p<.05) (b) significant gains for the RR students in silent reading rate (p= .05) and maze (p=.006) and (c) significant increases on vocabulary (p<.05), maze (p=.005), and MARSI  (p<.005) for the VS group at posttest. Unreliable patterns of error detection were observed for all groups at pretest and post-test. Results suggest that effects of fluency instruction be sought at the local level processes of reading using the maze test, which reliably detected reading improvements from fluency instruction (RR, WR) and vocabulary study (VS) in only 9 sessions. With significant gains on more reading measures, the WR condition appears superior to the RR condition as a fluency program for struggling college readers. Combining the WR condition with vocabulary study may augment students’ gains.