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The Limerick Reading Initiative: a reading intervention targeted at struggling readers in primary school
Author(s) -
O'Rourke Diarmuid,
Olshtroon Aoife,
O'Halloran Claire
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
support for learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.25
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1467-9604
pISSN - 0268-2141
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9604.12123
Subject(s) - fluency , reading (process) , spelling , phonics , reading comprehension , psychology , intervention (counseling) , quarter (canadian coin) , comprehension , mathematics education , primary education , pedagogy , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , psychiatry , history
In this study we examined the effectiveness of a reading intervention targeting a group of 24 struggling readers in ten primary schools in Ireland. The intervention consisted of two components; component one consisted of 15‐20 minutes delivery of the Toe‐by‐Toe programme (a well established systematic synthetic phonics programme) and the second component consisted of 15‐20 minutes guided oral reading using levelled texts. Using standardised measures of word reading, reading fluency, reading comprehension, word attack skills and spelling, we found that after five months of the intervention, the majority of the pupils made significant improvements in reading and reading fluency. The reading comprehension improvements were more varied with almost a quarter of participants showing remarkable progress, while the remainder recorded considerably less impressive gains. These results are very encouraging for classroom practitioners and demonstrate that research validated approaches can help at‐risk readers close the gap with their typically developing peers.