Effective intervention to improve reading skills
Children who fall below the expected reading level in the early years of their education often struggle to catch up. The UiT-ReadWell intervention has been designed to improve reading comprehension, now researchers are looking to assess its effectiveness through a multi-site randomised trial, as Professor Trude Nergård-Nilssen explains.
A child who falls below the expected reading level in the early years of their schooling may struggle to catch up later on, which is likely to then hamper their education and limit their prospects. The early years of formal schooling are a correspondingly important time in addressing any issues, and the UiT-ReadWell intervention has been developed to try and improve skills in those children identified as poor readers by national tests in Norway. “The intervention has been digitized, with all sessions administered through a laptop or tablet. Voiceover instructions are incorporated to ensure a standardized delivery of the programme. The UiT-ReadWell intervention involves carefully structured 45-minute sessions, emphasising both decoding and language comprehension,” explains Trude Nergård-Nilssen, Professor of Educational Psychology at the Arctic University of Norway.
As part of her research, Professor NergårdNilssen is now looking to assess the effectiveness of this intervention through a multi-site randomised trial on children between the ages of 7-9 in northern Norway, a region with a higher proportion of poor readers than the national average. “We invited children who fell below the expected standard to participate in the study. We
also assessed their language and reading skills to identify those who had performed below their usual standard in the test,” she outlines.
UiT-ReadWell intervention
The majority of those children identified as poor readers by the national test were invited to participate in the study. The volunteering children were then randomly assigned to either the control group, which continued with the usual classroom instruction, or to the intervention group that underwent the UiT-ReadWell intervention four times a week.
“The trial was conducted across multiple schools. This approach allowed us to gather data from a diverse range of settings, including different school sizes, geographic locations, socio-economic environments, and student demographics,” outlines Professor NergårdNilssen. The study was carefully controlled for specific variables, in order to reduce bias and ensure that the results of the two groups were directly comparable. “For example, there is a similar number of second language learners in the intervention and in the control group, while we also took the location of the school into account, as that is often a proxy for the parents’
education level,” says Professor NergårdNilssen. Children from more affluent areas may receive more support and encouragement from their parents for example, which may then influence their results, factors which Professor Nergård-Nilssen and her colleagues in the study have taken into account. “The two groups contain a similar number of children from each of the 25 schools involved in the study,” she continues.
These children all performed relatively poorly in the national reading test, yet the underlying reasons behind their results could be very different. There are two main reading disorders – dyslexia and reading comprehension disorder – but it wasn’t clear to researchers at the outset of the study which children had these conditions. “We invited these children to participate on the basis that they performed poorly in the national reading test. We didn’t know if they had either of these disorders, both, or even none,” says Professor Nergård-Nilssen. Learning to read involves both decoding printed words and translating them into speech, as well as comprehending the meaning of that speech, skills which Professor Nergård-Nilssen says are interconnected. “Without decoding, comprehension
is impossible. If you don’t decode well you will have problems with understanding what you are reading,” she continues. “In order to improve decoding skills in these children we have to work with their language skills, such as phoneme awareness, morpheme awareness and grammar.”
A variety of cognitive and language skills need to be in place for a child to become a good, fluent reader. One important aspect of this is grammar, which Professor Nergård-Nilssen says is central to reading comprehension. “If you’re not sensitive to the differences between various plural endings and different types of morphemes, for example, you will miss out a lot of information from a text,” she explains. While many children pick up these kinds
of rules simply through exposure to language, a lot of those who suffer from reading problems do not have these things in place, one of the issues that the UiT-ReadWell intervention is designed to address. “The decoding part of the intervention reinforces letter-sound correspondence as well as awareness of phonemes, while the language comprehension covers grammar, semantics and narratives. This includes both what words mean and also how words are built,” outlines Professor Nergård-Nilssen. “We have a lot of compound words in Norwegian, and we want to encourage children to reflect upon the structure of these words. What is a word composed of? Are there two or three words within it?”
The look or overall composition of a word is a fairly reliable guide to its pronunciation in Norwegian, contrasting sharply with English, which has a large number of phoneme-grapheme correspondences. There are many different ways of spelling the ‘u’ sound in English for example, whereas in Norwegian there’s really only one way of spelling it. “Norwegian orthography is fairly transparent. When you’ve learnt one letter or grapheme you essentially know how to pronounce it,” says Professor NergårdNilssen. Norwegian is very similar to Swedish and Danish, which are also Germanic languages, so Professor Nergård-Nilssen says the UiTReadWell intervention could be applied more widely, although some modifications would be necessary. “We work with oral language skills, so the same approach could be used across different languages, but of course you’d have to replace the texts and words,” she continues. “The teachers involved in this study have asked us if they can try this UiT-ReadWell intervention with older children, because they believe they would benefit from it as well. We want to focus on this very young age group in this study however.”
Preliminary findings
Researchers plan to compare the control group and the intervention group in their analysis of the results, which will provide a clearer picture of the impact of the intervention. The early signs are promising, with preliminary findings suggesting that the UiT-ReadWell intervention has a positive impact. “Evidence suggests the children become better readers after participating in
this programme,” says Professor NergårdNilssen. There is also the potential for follow-up studies, looking at the longer term impact of this intervention as children progress through the education system. “We want to see if, by doing this intervention at a very early stage, we can reduce the need for reading programmes later on in a child’s education. In Norway, children attend primary school between the ages of 6 and 13, and go to lower secondary school when they turn 13,” outlines Professor Nergård-Nilssen. “There is typically less time to work in this way as children get older, as they start using more digital tools
reading comprehension disorders,” says Professor Nergård-Nilssen. This could then lead to the development of more tailored approaches to addressing reading disorders, that better meet the needs of individual children. “Currently it’s more of a “one size fits all approach. There is a general lack of awareness of the difference between dyslexia and reading comprehension disorder,” explains Professor Nergård-Nilssen. “When we have finished collecting the data, we can then look back to investigate whether children with a particular language profile would benefit by working in a certain way.”
“The UiT-ReadWell intervention involves carefully structured 45-minute sessions, emphasising both decoding and language comprehension.”
to gather information and pursue their interests. I also believe that it’s easier to work on reading with children under the age of 9, as their readingrelated language skills is more malleable.”
The pre-registered study is currently in progress, with teachers using the UiT-ReadWell intervention during the ongoing academic year, and the eventual results will be of great interest to researchers. The overall aim for Professor NergårdNilssen and her colleagues is to assess the impact of the intervention on childrens’ reading abilities and language comprehension, while analysis of the data could also lead to some further insights.
“After we have finished the programme, we can dig deeper into the data and see if children with dyslexia have better outcomes than those with
A child’s family background may be an important factor, with a recent study finding that a child with a dyslexic parent have an up to 50 percent chance of being dyslexic themselves. Some of these parents may have felt a sense of shame at their own difficulties with reading, and learnt to mask their dyslexia, but there is a much greater openness about the issue today. “It’s much easier to talk about dyslexia nowadays,” acknowledges Professor NergårdNilssen. Children are born with a vulnerability to dyslexia, but an effective intervention can lead to significant improvements, believes Professor Nergård-Nilssen. “We believe that this intervention has a positive impact on decoding and language comprehension,” she stresses.
E ARly iNTERvENTioN foR childREN AT Risk of REAdiNg disoRdERs iN NoRThERN
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Project objectives
The study’s objective is to design and execute a research-informed intervention that boosts decoding and reading comprehension in students prone to literacy disorders. This will be accomplished by targeting the enhancement of readingrelated language and cognitive abilities.
Project funding
This research project was supported by a grant from The Norwegian Research Council (grant 298981).
The scientific Team
• Professor Trude Nergård-Nilssen (project manager/Principal Investigator), UiT the Arctic University of Norway
• Professor Oddgeir Friborg, UiT the Arctic University of Norway
• Professor Monica Melby-Lervåg, UiT the Arctic University of Norway/University of Oslo
• Associate Professor Bjarte Furnes, UiT the Arctic University of Norway/University of Bergen
• Research fellow/PhD candidate Line Walquist Sørli, UiT the Arctic University of Norway
• Research assistant Sølvi Grønning Riise, UiT the Arctic University of Norway
• Associate Professor Ømur Caglar-Ryeng, UiT the Arctic University of Norway contact details
Project Coordinator /Principal Investigator, Trude Nergård-Nilssen, Professor i spesialpedagogikk UiT Norges arktiske universitet, Hansine Hansens veg 18, 9019 Tromsø
T: +47 77 64 63 24 E: trude.nergard.nilssen@uit.no W: https://uit.readwell.com/
dr Trude Nergård-Nilssen is Professor at the UiT the Arctic University, Tromsø, Norway. Her research focuses on developmental dyslexia, developmental language disorders (DLD), reading comprehension, and reading and language intervention. She has developed the Dyslexia Marker Test (acronym: Dysmate), which is currently being standardised and validated for use in German and Swedish, and has been culturally translated and adapted for use in English.
dysmate links: Norwegian: https://www.dysmate.no/ German: https://www.dysmate.de/ Swedish: https://www.dysmate.se/ English: https://www.dysmate.co.uk/
