Ffk Intervention

This journal paper presents a study to evaluate the effectiveness of three intervention programs that target on improving phonological awareness for students who have reading deficits. The three programs were Fast ForWord(FFW), Earobics (2) and Lindamood Phonetic Sequencing Program (LiPS). These interventions have been chosen for two main reasons. First, they all particularly focus on phonological awareness, a core element of reading acquisition. Second, their publishers claim about the dramatic improvements in language and reading ability by using those programs. The FFW and Earobics are auditory-based interventions which incorporate interactive games while the LiPS, formally called the ADD program (Auditory Discrimination in Depth), is not based on interactive games and incorporates an articulatory approach. Sixty children with reading difficulties (with the average age of 9 years old) recruited from a local school were randomly assigned into 1-3 interventions. Participants received three 1 hour daily training session for 20 days. In

The results reveal some implications to me. First, it suggests that the intervention should not focus narrowly on phonological awareness. More activities, such as learning alphabetic principle or decoding may help readers to transfer the knowledge and get a better learning gain. Second, it may help students to achieve better results by extending training days longer rather than increasing the daily training duration. It is particularly important for me in designing my evaluation study. Others studies suggest that the training must be longer than 4 weeks (8-9 based on Torgesen, 2001). A fewl limitations, however, may reduce the reliability of the results. As mentioned by the authors, the small size and the lack of verbal IQ scores limit the conclusions. The lack of the posttest data makes it difficult to identify the possible long-term learning