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

3.14 Reading Intervention (formerly Cumbria Reading with Phonology
Project)
The Cumbria Reading with Phonology study supports the view that it is the combination of
phonological training and reading that is important for helping poorer readers. Children are
helped to isolate phonemes within words to appreciate that sounds can be common between
words and that specific sounds can be represented by particular letters. Lessons also include
story work.
Scheme
It is well documented that children who exhibit good phonological skills appear to make the
most progress in learning to read. This study illustrates that a combined phonological and
literacy skills training programme effectively boosts the reading skills of reading-delayed
seven-year-olds.
Poor readers in Y2 were assigned randomly to one of four groups. Group one received
training in phonological skills and help in learning to read. Pupils in the second group
received teaching in reading alone – the teaching of reading here and in the first group was
similar to Reading Recovery. The third group received teaching in phonological skills alone.
A control group received normal teaching. During the intervention period, which lasted 20
weeks, each of the experimental groups received forty 30-minute teaching sessions.
The reading with phonology package combined a highly structured reading scheme with
systematic activities to promote phonological awareness. The first section of a session was
devoted to re-reading a familiar book whilst the teacher kept a record of the child reading.
This allowed for rehearsal of familiar words in different contexts. Phonological activities and
letter identification were also involved in the first part of the session, accomplished using a
multi sensory approach (feeling, writing and naming.) The second part of the session involved
writing a story and cutting it up. The last part of the session introduced a new book.
Evaluation
This was a very tightly designed and administered study, carried out by an adviser in Cumbria
LEA and two colleagues from the University of York. The four groups were matched on
reading age at the pre-test, and teaching time for the three experimental groups was equated as
closely as possible. The 93 children in the three experimental groups were taught by 23
teachers. Each teacher worked with groups of two to nine children in order to reduce the
effect of differentiation. The time of day at which children received their intervention was
systematically varied. The testers were unaware of the children’s experimental status.
The Reading with Phonology group made significantly more progress in reading than the
other three groups; the other groups did not differ - in other words, neither reading-only nor
phonology-only brought about any greater progress than normal schooling.
Much the same finding emerged from a very similar study in Rhode Island, USA (Iversen and
Tunmer, 1993), in which the reading intervention was the authorised form of Reading
Recovery.
The reading with phonology approach, now known as Reading Intervention, or as Sound
Linkage, the name of published materials derived from and supporting it, continues to be in
widespread use in Cumbria, and Peter Hatcher has published further research on it. This
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