Effects of an early reading intervention based on grapho-syllabic decoding and fluency training in French elementary schools

IntroductionStudies conducted in recent decades have led to the development of instructional interventions to help prevent or eliminate a large proportion of reading difficulties. However, few experiments have been conducted in French schools.ObjectiveAims for this research were to create, implement and evaluate a remediation program for French students with reading difficulties up to the end of elementary school.MethodThis paper examines the effects of a decoding-skills and fluency-based intervention on 133 struggling readers in second- to fifth-grade. Depending on the nature of their reading difficulties, students were given a year-long training based either on grapho-syllabic conversion — focusing on syllable units, rather than phonemic units, is considered a promising way of helping French-speaking beginning readers — or on repeated reading techniques, used to improve fluency.ResultsIncreases in written-word identification scores were greater for students who followed the program than they were for a control group of 184 students with reading difficulties who did not follow the program.ConclusionThe results show that programs combining early evaluation of written-word identification abilities followed by a year-long series of remediation sessions focusing on specific difficulties can help students progress in written-word identification. However, further research is needed to examine why our program was less effective with children from disadvantaged (“éducation prioritaire”) areas.