Ffk Intervention

This journal paper presents a study to evaluate the effectiveness of three intervention programs that target on improving phonological awareness for students who have reading deficits. The three programs were Fast ForWord(FFW), Earobics (2) and Lindamood Phonetic Sequencing Program (LiPS). These interventions have been chosen for two main reasons. First, they all particularly focus on phonological awareness, a core element of reading acquisition. Second, their publishers claim about the dramatic improvements in language and reading ability by using those programs. The FFW and Earobics are auditory-based interventions which incorporate interactive games while the LiPS, formally called the ADD program (Auditory Discrimination in Depth), is not based on interactive games and incorporates an articulatory approach. Sixty children with reading difficulties (with the average age of 9 years old) recruited from a local school were randomly assigned into 1-3 interventions. Participants received three 1 hour daily training session for 20 days. In

each group, students were randomly assigned to a group of five or four. Students who received the FFW and Eabrobics were each assigned a computer station with stereo headphones while those who received the LiPS were received intervention by a supervisor. Three licensed speech and language pathologists (SLPs) who worked as intervention supervisors were trained in advance. The specific learning activities for these three intervention are shown in the tables (Table 1, 2). Three tests sessions were conducted. Pretest (T1) was adminstrated 4-6 weeks before the intervention. Posttest (T2) was performed 6-8 weeks after intervention ended. Although researchers collected the long-term posttest data (T3), they did not use it because participants’ interventions during that school year varied considerably. In each testing stage, resarechers tested participants’ hearing ability, phonemic awareness (based on PAT: Phoneme Blending and Phoneme Segmentation), language-based skills (based on Clinical Evaluation of Language Foundation-3) and reading-related skills (based on Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised: Letter-word Identification, Passage Comprehension, Work Attack, Spelling). Standard scores were collected in language-based and reading-related skill tests while raw scores were used for the phonemic awareness test due to many participants’ scores below the cutoff. Results indicated that both Earobics and LiPS were associated with gains in phonological awareness after 6 weeks. Earobics group improved in segmenting phonemes and the LiPS group improved in segmenting and blending phoneme. However, none of the programs were associated with significant transfer effects to language or reading at the posttest. The authors attribute the better results of LiPS to its broad training contents that not limited to phonological awareness.

This paper is the first and the only one that have examined the program Earobics.

The results reveal some implications to me. First, it suggests that the intervention should not focus narrowly on phonological awareness. More activities, such as learning alphabetic principle or decoding may help readers to transfer the knowledge and get a better learning gain. Second, it may help students to achieve better results by extending training days longer rather than increasing the daily training duration. It is particularly important for me in designing my evaluation study. Others studies suggest that the training must be longer than 4 weeks (8-9 based on Torgesen, 2001). A fewl limitations, however, may reduce the reliability of the results. As mentioned by the authors, the small size and the lack of verbal IQ scores limit the conclusions. The lack of the posttest data makes it difficult to identify the possible long-term learning

gain.

Even though I agree with view that more activities such as learning alphabetic principle or decoding may help readers to transfer the knowledge, it seems too simple to just attribute all the better learning gains to this reason. In fact, the different instructed approaches maight also contribute to the learning differences. The FFW and Earobics are computer-based training while the LiPS is given by SLPs. The involvement of specialized instructors could impact the learning outcomes (e.g. help students to draw attention). In addition, the speech-based nature of LiPS may also support better learning of phonological awareness through the multisensory approach (visual, auditory, kinesthetic modalities). However, these factors were simply ignored by the authors.