Intervention in Early Reading among Pupils with Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to verify the effectiveness of an intervention program aimed at teaching early reading skills, more specifically alphabetic skills and phonological processing, in pupils with Typical Development (TD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). A total of 99 pupils with an average age of 5 years old from 54 schools on the Island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) participated. Initial alphabetical skills, phonological processing, and verbal working memory were assessed before and after the intervention. The intervention program consisted of 60 sessions with a duration of 15 minutes and was organized at multiple levels of educational support, preferably within the regular classroom, and had the collaboration between Early Childhood Education Teachers and Speech Language Therapists. The results indicate that the pupils with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) initially presented a low performance in all the studied skills than those diagnosed with typical development. However, pupils who received the intervention program, those diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and the group with Typical Development (TD), showed greater gains in Letter Recognition and in Grapheme-Phoneme Association. There is some discussion about the educational implications for organizing an early intervention of a collaborative and inclusive nature within an intervention response model with various levels of practice. In addition, the nature of the activities in game formats enhance interaction and promote learning for all the pupils.