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

There appeared to be no tendency for schemes other than Inference Training to bring about
greater improvements in children’s comprehension than in their reading accuracy, or for the
opposite to occur.
However, there were three other schemes which had substantial impacts on comprehension,
namely Paired Reading, Phono-Graphix and THRASS. Again, these are highly structured
schemes which seem to have targeted comprehension.
Bentley and Reid (1995, pp.21-22) have several useful suggestions for (less formally
researched) methods of supporting struggling readers who are not ‘reading for meaning’.
From the limited evidence available it can tentatively be deduced that children’s
comprehension skills are benefited most by being directly targeted, and not indirectly
through work on reading accuracy.
2.7 Focusing on self-esteem
A series of four studies on this topic was carried out over a decade or more from 1970 to 1984
in Somerset - see pp.43-46. The results can be summarised as follows.
Self-esteem counselling by a professional educational psychologist was effective in raising
reading attainment. But since this was too expensive an approach for general use, the
researcher then trained non-professionals to deliver self-esteem counselling. When used
alone, this was not effective, but when combined with a specific reading intervention it was
very effective. And in the final study drama teaching designed to boost self-esteem plus a
specific reading intervention was also very effective - and could be seen as even more costefficient.
Even though no further comparable studies seem to have been done for nearly 20 years,
working on self-esteem and reading in parallel would seem to have definite potential.
2.8 Focusing on ICT
Results from the three studies using ICT as their main resource (AcceleRead AcceleWrite,
[ILS], RITA) are again mixed. These studies differed significantly in scale. AcceleRead
AcceleWrite’s two studies involved only a few children in each of several year groups. At the
other extreme, [Integrated Learning Systems] was a national evaluation led by the University
of Leicester for the (then) National Council for Educational Technology, now the British
Educational Communications and Technology Agency.
RITA did produce significant progress, but no more than the non-computer-based intervention
to which it was compared, IA&T – hardly the result that advocates of the technology expect.
The main result of [ILS] was that its impact on reading was non-significant. The children in
the experiments did make some progress, but no more than would be expected from normal
schooling. And in one primary school where an Integrated Learning System had been
targeted on children with SEN, the children in the project made significantly less progress
than the controls (see NCET, 1996, pp. 19 and viii, school U). Even more generally, Ann
Lewis’s (1999) review of using ILS with children with low attainments in reading concluded
that its effectiveness had not been demonstrated.
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