Phonologically Based Intervention

I recently read an article from the Journal of Literacy Research.  The article was titled "A Phonologically Based Intervention for School-Age Children with Language Impairment: Implications for Reading Achievement"  It was by Michaela J. Ritter, Jungjun Park, Terrill F. Saxon and Karen A. Colson.  This article was originally published in the 30 September 2013 edition.

This article was extremely insightful and interesting.  It covered a topic I had not much prior knowledge of.  The basis of the article and the research done in the article was about children with language impairment and there higher risk for experiencing problems in reading.  Children with language impairment are as much as six times more likely to have difficulties to learn to read then typical children.  Phonological Awareness is essential component for children to learn to read.  So, phonological awareness intervention was to be used with children with language impairment grades k-3.

Studies in the past have shown that students receiving phonological awareness intervention are more successful developing reading skills then those who go without.  Overall the study is to further research to prove the benefits of phonological awareness intervention is a good and effective practice.

The two main questions from this articles study to be answered was:
1. Do school-age children (grades 1-3) with LI who receive explicit PAI over a 12-week period differ significantly in performance improvement on measures of PA, word-level reading and passage comprehension tasks in comparison with grade-matched children with LI who do not receive the intervention?
2. Is there a difference in magnitude of treatment gains of PAI across different grade levels (e.g. equivalent, increase, or decrease)? That is, does the clinical advantage of PAI persist into school grades that are later than kindergarten?

The study was done with three similar elementary schools.  The demographics (income, ethnic groups, credential and etc) were the same throughout the schools.  The schools were not told whether they were a experimental group or a control group.  The study was done with a quasi-experimental pre- and post-group design.  This would be a gauge on improvement over the 12 weeks of work.

One thing I found interesting when reading the article was the breakdown on the students.  I noticed in the article that there was only 17 females compared to 58 males participating.  It mentioned that it is common for an unbalanced gender distribution in language impairment.  I never knew this, and was surprised at such a vast difference.  I wonder why males have more issues typically then female students.

The work was done with students for 12 weeks.  There was two 15 minute sessions per week with explicit PAI training.  This was the only difference between the control group and the experimental group.  Both groups continued their normal routines throughout the day.  After the work was done over the three weeks and the pre and post tests were given the results were great.  The improvement in the PAI students compared to the control group was amazing.  The analysis was done in tow ways first was the groups were compared on post-test measures.  The second was the experimental groups results were categorized by grade.

Table 2. Group Performances on the Five Dependent Variables at Pre- and
Postintervention Assessments.
                                                    CA (n = 30)                              PAI (n = 34)
                                               Pre                 Post                     Pre                    Post
Measure                                M (SD)           M (SD)                 M (SD)            M (SD)
Blending words                    7.77 (2.48)       8.00 (2.31)           7.66 (2.40)        9.88 (2.04)
Blending non-words             7.55 (2.87)       7.81 (1.83)           7.44 (1.81)        9.76 (1.94)
Letter-word identification    84.80 (13.53)    85.07 (10.85)       85.97 (11.02)    94.07 (12.89)
Word attack                       83.33 (12.21)    85.63 (12.32)       86.60 (11.31)    93.99 (11.73)
Passage comprehension      78.07 (10.09)     80.47 (8.16)        79.88 (9.76)      86.87 (9.42)
Note. CA = age-matched controls, PAI = experimental group who received phonological awareness
intervention. The grade range of the two groups was first to third grade.
Phonological awareness subtests taken from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner,
Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999).
Reading sub-tests taken from the Woodcock Diagnostic Reading Battery–Revised (WDRB-R; Woodcock,1997)

As we can see from this graph from the article the leap from pre to post for PAI is great in every category.  I was amazed especially with the growth in blending of words and non-words.  That was the area that saw the greatest improvement.  Each area worked on though, saw vast improvement.  The improvement gap was larger in each category for PAI compared to control group.  That is great.  They also saw from their research that the lower the grade the greater the success for PAI.  This could be for a number of reasons.  I think this means though that PAI should be implemented in pre-school through second grade.

Overall this was a great insightful article.  I learned so much from researching it.  I feel that this will help especially if I teach those emergent reading grades.  I think having tools to help students in need that struggle with reading and language is essential.  As well as Phonological Awareness intervention did, I think it should be applied to all elementary schools.  The research should continue, though it seems to be very effective.  Great article and look forward to sharing more.

Here is a link to the article:
http://jlr.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/content/45/4/356.full.pdf+html