Intervention for a lexical reading and spelling difficulty in two Greek-speaking primary age children

ABSTRACT

An intervention study was carried out with two nine-year-old Greek-speaking dyslexic children. Both children were slow in reading single words and text and had difficulty in spelling irregularly spelled words. One child was also poor in non-word reading. Intervention focused on spelling in a whole-word training using a flashcard technique that had previously been found to be effective with English-speaking children. Post-intervention assessments conducted immediately at the end of the intervention, one month later and then five months later showed a significant improvement in spelling of treated words that was sustained over time. In addition, both children showed generalisation of improvement to untrained words and an increase in scores in a standardised spelling assessment. The findings support the effectiveness of theoretically based targeted intervention for literacy difficulties.

KEYWORDS:

• Dysgraphia
• Dual-route model
• Spelling intervention

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the children for donating their time and to the Editor and reviewers for their valuable comments. We would like to thank Saskia Kohnen for her valuable contribution to this manuscript and a second anonymous reviewer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Georgia Z. Niolaki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-141X