Teaching Phonological Recoding to Young Children with Phonological Processing Deficits: The Effect on Sight-Vocabulary Acquisition

This training study combines within-subjects comparisons of several literacy tasks with individual case studies of children with dyslexia over a five-month reading intervention. It was hypothesized that 12 first- and second-grade children with deficits in phonological processing could be taught to use phonological recoding strategies through direct-instruction tutorials. Training included (a) phonological awareness in the form of instruction in segmenting and spelling, (b) letter-sound associations, and (c) guided reading using both phonics-controlled and narrative-controlled text. As a group, the children made significant gains in standard scores on sight-word reading, nonword reading, and spelling. After training, contrary to previous descriptions of children with dyslexia, nonword reading was at least as strong as sight-word reading for the group and for eight of the 12 individual children. There was a great deal of variation in individual response to treatment, with less progress for children with concomitant deficits in phonological awareness and phonological coding in lexical access as measured by rapid continuous, or serial, naming.