Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

training in phonological awareness, decoding and word study
guided and independent reading of progressively more difficult texts
writing exercises
engaging students in practising comprehension strategies while reading texts
daily or near-daily frequency of intervention sessions
1:1 or small group tuition.
In about half of the studies reviewed by Scammacca et al. (2007), teachers provided the
tuition, and in the remainder tuition was given by trained personnel who were not
teachers (e.g. parents, students, teaching assistants). The issue of whether delivery of
instruction by the latter can be as effective as that delivered by the former is taken up
later in this review.
Of the 12 studies considered by Scammacca et al. (2007) the following have been
selected as being particularly relevant for this review: Foorman et al. (1997), Schneider,
Roth and Ennemoser (2000), Vadasy et al. (2002), and Mathes et al. (2005), and these
are considered in more detail below.
2.2.5 Foorman et al. (1997)
An RCT study by Foorman, Francis, Winikates, Mehta, Schatschneider & Fletcher (1997)
compared three types of reading interventions for children with reading disabilities in 2 nd
and 3 rd grades in 13 different schools. A synthetic phonics programme based on the
Orton-Gillingham approach was compared with an analytic phonics programme and a
sight-word programme in which children learned about 150 words plus endings.
Specially trained teachers gave tuition for one hour each day to groups of about eight
pupils. When data from 114 pupils who had completed at least six months of tuition
were analysed, it was found that the two phonics groups out-performed the sight-word
group on phonological analysis (effect sizes 0.23–0.59) but not on word reading, and
the synthetic phonics group out-performed the analytic phonics group on both
phonological analysis (ES 0.39) and word reading (ES 0.38).
2.2.6 Schneider, Roth and Ennemoser (2000)
Schneider et al. (2000) screened 700 children in 25 kindergarten classes in Germany for
deficits in phonological processing. The 208 children falling into the bottom quartile were
assigned either to phonological awareness training (PA), letter-sound-training (LS) or
both (PA+LS). After participant attrition and eliminating children who moved into special
education, the remaining 138 children were compared with a comparison group of 115
kindergarten children with normal phonological processing, who received the standard
kindergarten curriculum. Intervention was provided daily in 10- to 15-minute sessions by
trained kindergarten teachers. The PA group received 20 weeks of tuition in phoneme
discrimination and production, rhyming, syllable segmentation, and word reading. The
LS group received 10 weeks of training in letter-sound relationships. The PA+LS group
received 10 weeks of PA training, followed by 10 weeks of LS training.
At the end of kindergarten, the PA group significantly outperformed all the other groups
in phonological awareness, and the PA+LS group scored significantly higher than either
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