What Works for Children with Literacy Difficulties? - Digital ...

As the Appendix again shows, most control groups made normal progress. This finding is,
however, circular: children receiving ordinary teaching mostly made the progress to be
expected of children receiving ordinary teaching. What is more interesting is that some
control groups made better than expected progress despite, apparently, receiving no extra
intervention – see especially Paired Reading. What secret might this scheme have had? It
seems that in Kirklees (the LEA where the Paired Reading study was conducted) the
experimental intervention affected a significant proportion of schools.
So it may be that Paired Reading affected a high proportion of the schools in the area in which
it took place, and the experimental schools were observed by others. This may have
influenced non-participating schools to ‘raise their game’, and provide ‘ordinary teaching’ of
a higher effectiveness than usual. Density of implementation seems not to have been a feature
of schemes where the control groups made normal progress, and it might be reasonable to
conclude that this is more like the normal situation, and therefore that ordinary teaching
provides extra impact only in exceptional circumstances.
On the other hand, if the ‘density’ effect is real, it would support an argument for
implementing initiatives at a fairly high density and/or with great publicity.
The evidence on ordinary teaching therefore proves the need for early intervention
schemes: in general, ordinary teaching does not enable children with literacy difficulties
to catch up.
2.4 Focusing on phonological skills for reading
Phonological skills, including spelling, were the focus of the largest number of studies.
Among those analysed here the following mainly phonological schemes focused on reading:
- four main schemes: AcceleRead AcceleWrite, [PAT], Phono-Graphix and
THRASS, and
- five alternative interventions [Phonology-only in Cumbria], Rapid decoding in
Inference Training, [Phonological Intervention in the Reading Recovery in London
and Surrey study], Phonics-only in Somerset (1) and DISTAR-only in Somerset (4).
Those shown in square brackets are relatively ineffective, while the rest are at least
reasonably effective. So the overall evidence on the effectiveness of schemes which focused
on phonological skills is mixed.
However, a generalisation can be drawn from the five schemes mentioned above which were
alternative interventions within larger evaluations. In all of these except Somerset (1), the
phonological scheme was substantially less effective than the main experimental approach;
and the main approach was broader and incorporated work on phonological skills.
This description also fits Phono-Graphix and THRASS, which give explicit attention to
grapheme-phoneme relationships within a broad framework, and were effective.
For greatest impact with struggling readers, therefore, work on phonological skills
should be embedded within a broad approach.
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