Efficacy of small group reading intervention for beginning readers with reading-delay: a randomised controlled trial Peter J. Hatcher, 1 Charles Hulme, 1 Jeremy N.V. Miles, 1 Julia M. Carroll, 2 Janet Hatcher, 3 Simon Gibbs, 4 Glynnis Smith, 4 Claudine Bowyer-Crane, 1 and Margaret J. Snowling 1 1 University of York, UK; 2 University of Warwick, UK; 3 Dyslexia Institute and University of York, UK; 4 North Yorkshire Education Service, UK Background: This study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention for reading-delayed children in Year-1 classes. Methods: A sample (N ¼ 77) of children drawn from 14 schools representing those with the weakest reading skills were randomly allocated to one of two groups. A 20-week intervention group received the intervention for two consecutive 10-week periods, while a 10-week intervention group only received the intervention for the second 10 weeks of the study. The programme was delivered in daily 20-minute sessions that alternated between small group (N ¼ 3) and individual teaching. The pro- gramme combined phoneme awareness training, word and text reading, and phonological linkage exercises. Results: The children receiving the intervention during the first 10-week period made sig- nificantly more progress on measures of letter knowledge, single word reading, and phoneme awareness than children not receiving the intervention. However, the children who only received the intervention during the second 10-week period made rapid progress and appeared to catch up with the children who had been given the more prolonged intervention. Failure to respond to the intervention was predicted by poor initial literacy skills and being in receipt of free school meals. Conclusion: A reading intervention programme delivered on a daily basis by trained teaching assistants is an effective intervention for children who show reading delays at the end of their first year in school. However, around one-quarter of the children did not respond to this intervention and these children would appear to need more intensive or more prolonged help to improve their reading skills. Keywords: Reading intervention, remedial teaching, reading difficulties, randomised controlled trial. One of the main obstacles to successful reading is poor phonological awareness (Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Vellutino et al., 1996) and specifically the ability to manipulate the phonemic segments of spoken words (Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Ste- venson, 2004). Difficulties with phoneme awareness are common in children who enter school from so- cially disadvantaged backgrounds (Phillips & Loni- gan, 2005), in those who have experienced difficulties with speech and language development (Catts & Kamhi, 2005), and in children at family risk of dyslexia (Pennington & Lefly, 2001). Such findings provide the theoretical motivation for reading inter- vention programmes that promote phoneme aware- ness and letter knowledge, the two key foundations of the alphabetic principle (Byrne & Fielding-Barns- ley, 1995; Cunningham, 1990; Hatcher, Hulme, & Snowling, 2004). There is now a large body of evidence showing that the most effective reading interventions are those that combine explicit teaching in phonological awareness with highly structured reading instruc- tion using text, the difficulty of which is carefully matched to that of the learner (Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis, 1994; Hatcher et al., 2004; Iverson & Tunmer, 1993; but see Wise & Olson, 1995 for an alternative view). Such findings have in recent years led to policy recommendations for the teaching of reading to all children, both in the USA (National Reading Panel, 2000) and in the UK via the National Literacy Strat- egy (DfEE, 1998). Arguably, the implementation of such policies should provide all children with a good start to literacy development following school entry. However, there are still children who fail to respond well to such whole-class provision (Hatcher et al., 2004) and it has been argued that such children may require a more individualised approach (Torgesen, 2005). One example of an approach that targets the reading skills of children in their second year in school who are developing reading slowly is the UK’s Early Literacy Support (ELS) programme (DfES, 2001). This programme is considered appropriate for children with reading skills below the 25th percentile who are expected, with additional help, to attain skills closer to the 50th percentile. The programme provides training in phonological and grapheme linkage skills and segmenting and blending words in reading and writing. Children also learn the sounds and names of letters, learn to read and write com- mon words and are encouraged to use phonic and other strategies to check and self-correct words read or written in text. They also undertake guided text reading and writing exercises. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47:8 (2006), pp 820–827 doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01559.x Ó 2006 The Authors Journal compilation Ó 2006 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health. 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