Teaching prereading skills to disabled children.
Daily blended language lessons lift reading scores for elementary kids with Down syndrome.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lovaas (1993) ran a small case series in Sweden. The kids had Down syndrome and were in late elementary school.
The team used an early language programme every day. They taught sound games, sorting by shape, and letter-sound links.
What they found
After the lessons, the children could read better than the low scores seen in national Down-syndrome data.
The gains showed up in classroom reading tests.
How this fits with other research
Madden et al. (2003) later taught only phonological awareness to three kids with Down syndrome. The kids learned the trained sounds but the skill did not spread to speech clarity. The 1993 paper bundled phonics with wider language work and saw broader reading gains.
Leaf et al. (2012) pooled many studies and found that vocabulary, not phonics, best predicts reading gaps in Down syndrome. This seems to clash with the 1993 success, but the meta-analysis looked at already-known words while the 1993 programme taught new letter-sound links directly.
Miltenberger et al. (2013) showed that Dutch pupils with Down syndrome learn more reading in regular classrooms than in special schools. The 1993 lessons could fit neatly into any inclusive room.
Why it matters
You can start early and teach the building blocks of reading to kids with Down syndrome. Mix short sound games, sorting tasks, and clear letter-sound lessons. Run them daily and track reading level each week. The approach is low cost and works in a typical classroom.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A Swedish survey suggests that less than 10% of children with Down's syndrome between 7 and 10 years of age are able to read a simple text. Children with Down's syndrome in a programme for early language intervention show clear progress in reading ability. The programme focuses on general language development, auditory and visual perception, and fine-motor ability. Prereading skills are stimulated in a systematic way such as identifying and discriminating sound-patterns at the level of the word, the syllable and the segments, and children are helped to categorize forms, to discriminate and understand pictures, to recognize the direction of reading, and to realize the grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1993 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1993.tb00884.x