Teaching reading in an inncer city school through a multisensory teaching approach

Annals of Dyslexia, 2002 by Joshi, R Malatesha, Dahlgren, Mary, Boulware-Gooden, Regina

The treatment group received the multisensory reading instruction. The teachers in the two classrooms of the treatment group received 42 hours of training in the multisensory techniques during the beginning of the academic year. They were certified as Academic Language Therapists because they completed a structured, sequential, OG-based curriculum, and had participated in a clinical supervision under a qualified Academic Language Therapist. The instructional materials were obtained from the Payne Education Center and based on Alphabetic Phonics (Cox, 1992). A qualified instructor from the Payne Education Center observed the treatment groups once a week and ensured the fidelity of the implementation of the program.

Both the control and the treatment groups received 50 minutes of daily instruction in literacy activities. Teachers for all four classrooms had an average of 10 years of teaching experience.

At the end of the academic year in May, the same tests used for pretesting were used as post-tests. Alternate forms of the GMRT and WRMT-R were used. GMRT, form L, TOPA, form B, and WRMT-R, form H were administered as post-tests. The number of correct responses on TOPA and the Word Attack subtest of WRMT-R were scored and then converted into standard scores, which had a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The number of correct responses from the Comprehension sub-- test of GMRT were scored and then converted to Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE). The mean score of NCE is 50 with a standard deviation of 10. Since the tests were administered on different days, 31, 32, and 30 children from the control group completed the phonological awareness, decoding, and comprehension measures, respectively. Similarly, the number of children from the treatment group completing the phonological, decoding, and comprehension measures was 24, 25, and 24, respectively The means and standard deviations of the pre-test and post-test scores are shown in table I.

RESULTS

Statistical analyses were conducted to see to what extent children in both groups improved in the different aspects of reading, and whether or not children in the treatment group showed significantly greater gains than children in the control group for each of the variables. When the gain scores of the two groups were compared by using repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance, it was found that the gain scores of the treatment groups were significantly higher than that of the control groups. The following F values were found: for phonological awareness, F^sub (1,53)^ = 5.02, p

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The results of this study showed that first-grade children taught with the multisensory teaching approach based on OG principles performed better on tests of phonological awareness, decoding, and reading comprehension than the control groups. It may, therefore, be concluded that the higher scores for children from the treatment groups may be attributed to the multisensory approach used in this study. As noted earlier, children in the control groups were not taught phonics skills in a systematic and explicit fashion, and they did not show any significant gains in phonological awareness and decoding skills.