Tackling Two of the Most Important Unresolved Tasks in Reading Intervention

An important question in education is how to help young children who struggle to learn to read despite being well-taught in their regular classrooms. Many of the children with low reading ability also come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

There is not a lot of evidence on how to support children with low reading ability become better readers. This is especially true when children still have low reading ability despite experiencing attempts to teach them in both their regular whole class and then in small groups. As a result, in this study we will explore the best ways of training teachers to use programs that we have developed to support reading for these children who have not responded well to earlier teaching (this is one of the tough jobs in our project title). These programs have several new elements. One element is teaching morphology. Morphology means shared word meanings such as the shared meanings between words like sign, design, signal, and signature. Another element is called set-for-variability. This means teaching children to have mental flexibility in using relationships between letters and sounds to read English. We will run our study to see whether including these new elements leads to children with low reading ability improving their reading. By doing this we will help children teachers and families and also contribute to a science of reading.

To achieve these goals, we will carry out two phases of study. In phase 1, we will randomly allocate 50 schools to one condition where we will teach morphology and 50 schools to the other condition where we will teach set-for-variability. In all schools we will also encourage teachers to teach children to use the relationships between letters and sounds to read words. This is called phonics. Doing such work and still having impact in a large number of schools is a major challenge. This is the second of the tough jobs referred to in our project title. In each school we will come in and train teachers of grade 1 and 2 children how to use our programs, and focusing on the children who have low reading ability. In the second part of the study, we will work with a smaller set of children in Grade 3 who still have low reading ability despite our earlier work. In this latter case the groups of children may be both smaller in number and the teaching may go on for longer to have an effect.