A comparison of two reading interventions for children with reading disabilities

This study compared the effectiveness of two reading interventions in a pub lic school setting. Forty-five second-grade children with reading disabilit ies were randomly assigned to a 6-week phonological awareness, word analogy , or math-training program. The two reading interventions differed from eac h other in (a) the unit of word analysis (phoneme versus onset-rime), (b) t he approach to intervention (contextualized versus decontextualized), and ( c) the primary domain of reading instruction (oral versus written language) . Results indicate that children in both reading programs achieved signific ant gains in beginning reading skills, learning the specific skills taught in their respective programs, and applying what they had learned to uninstr ucted material on several transfer-of-learning measures, in comparison to c hildren in the control group. For children in both reading intervention gro ups, the most significant mediator of growth in oral reading fluency was a child's initial level of word identification skill. Implications of these f indings are that systematic, high quality reading intervention can occur in a small group, public school setting and that there are several different paths to the remediation of children with reading disabilities.