Evidence for Word Fluency Intervention for Dyslexics
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.
