Barbara W. Wise and Richard K. Olson
University of Colorado
Children with Specific Reading Disability (SRD) struggle to read accurately and fluently. Research over the past 25 years, much of it supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), has examined the behavioral genetic aspects of SRD. This research suggests that deficits in analytic language skills involved in phonological awareness and decoding underlie most cases of SRD, and that inherited, brain-based factors affect these deficits (Lyon 1995). The Colorado Remediation Studies continues this investigation, looking at ways in which the underlying phonological deficits can be remedied. The project is also looking at whether training children to develop phonological skills is sufficient to improve reading for children with SRD, and whether there are better methods for this remediation for different children.
In nearly all of our remediation studies, second- to fifth-grade children with reading difficulties read with talking computers for half an hour a day, during their normally scheduled reading time. They read stories on the computer, clicking the mouse to get help with spoken decoding when they found words difficult. The children received training in phonological awareness and decoding before and during the reading practice. As a control, some groups of children were trained in comprehension strategies while others received training in phonological skills. Both groups spent equal amounts of time on the computer. The conditions differed by design in how much time was spent reading context, since one condition spent half of its computer time on phonological exercises.
After nearly 30 hours of training, the phonologically trained children made significantly greater gains in all tests of untimed word reading and phonological skills compared with the classroom controls. The extra reading in context condition gained slightly but significantly more in a test of time-limited word recognition. The gains were substantial, given the limited number of training hours. The results are important in that phonologically trained children showed gains in different reading processes compared to classroom controls, as well as to children trained in comparison conditions matched on attention and computer time. This is often difficult to achieve in remediation studies.
We have examined gains a year after training ceased in most of our studies. For most children, levels of gain were maintained but rates of gain slowed to that of previous years, and differences between the groups remained on phonological skills but not on word reading. Our current and future studies are looking at whether longer training times can improve automaticity, application, and transfer of these skills to reading and writing away from the computer.
We have also recently compared training in phonological awareness and decoding with and without a talking computer—or speech-motor base (Lindamood & Lindamood 1975; Montgomery 1981). The methods all used were direct and structured instruction in a guided discovery format, with large amounts of phonics and practice in applying the concepts in reading in and out of context. We hypothesized that children with the most severe deficits might benefit especially from the concrete base of the speech-motor awareness. However, students in all trained conditions gained much more than children in the control classroom, but surprisingly, the gains were nearly the same from all our methods. This may encourage teachers, at least within school samples, to choose a teaching method that they understand and enjoy. If the method aims to remedy phonological deficits in a structured and sensible way, they may not need to argue too much about their specific choice (Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis 1994; Lundber, Grost, & Peterson 1988). (At some point, we hope to return to this question in a clinic-based sample with more children with severe deficits.)
Taken together, our studies demonstrate that phonological skills can be remediated, but that this training is not sufficient by itself to get children to apply these skills automatically in fluent reading. Finally, its appears that the exact method of teaching phonological awareness may be less important than once thought. For more information, contact Barbara Wise at (303) 492?6965.
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