Focusing Attention on Decoding for Children With Poor Reading Skills: Design and Preliminary Tests of the Word Building Intervention

This study examined the reading skills of children who have deficient decoding skills in the years following the first grade and traced their progress across 20 sessions of a decoding skills intervention called Word Building. Initially, the children demon-strated deficits in decoding, reading comprehension, and phonemic awareness skills. Further examination of decoding attempts revealed a pattern of accurate decoding of the first grapheme in a word, followed by relatively worse performance on subsequent vowels and consonants, suggesting that these children were not engaging in full al-phabetic decoding. The intervention directed attention to each grapheme position within a word through a procedure of progressive minimal pairing of words that dif-fered by one grapheme. Relative to children randomly assigned to a control group, children assigned to the intervention condition demonstrated significantly greater im-provements in decoding attempts at all grapheme positions and also demonstrated significantly greater improvements in standardized measures of decoding, reading comprehension, and phonological awareness. Results are discussed in terms of the consequences of not fully engaging in alphabetic decoding during early reading expe-rience, and the self-teaching role of alphabetic decoding for improving word identifi-cation, reading comprehension, and phonological awareness skills.