Performance of children at risk for reading difficulties submitted to an intervention program

To assess the applicability of an intervention program to children at risk for reading disabilities.

This experimental study compared 10 children at risk for reading difficulty submitted to a phonological decoding intervention program (study group) with 10 other children at risk for reading difficulty not submitted to the program (control group). The intervention program was based on two international studies. It comprised 24 sessions: the first 12 sessions were conducted with groups of two to three children, whereas the others were performed individually. The sessions lasted 50 minutes and were held twice a week. Statistical analysis was conducted using the Student's t-test and the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test.

Children at risk for reading difficulties submitted to the phonological decoding intervention program showed statistically significant improvement at post-assessment in the performance of the following skills: letter naming; phoneme-grapheme relationship; phonological awareness; phonological working memory for non-words; phonological working memory for digits in direct order; alphabet recognition in sequence; writing under dictation of words and pseudowords; reading of words and pseudowords.

The phonological decoding intervention program showed applicability to improve the prerequisite skills of reading and writing of children at risk for reading disabilities.