Reading difficulties affect up to 30% of Australian primary school children and have dire long-term academic and psychosocial consequences. Reading difficulties not only result in a reduced ability to learn, but have far reaching implications, including low self concept, problematic behaviour, poor social relations, and delinquency. These consequences undermine Australia's social and economic foundations by preventing young Australians from reaching their full potential. The 2009 report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), evaluating reading performance of teenagers from 41 countries, demonstrates that Australia is falling behind other industrialised countries in terms of the ever-increasing gap in reading attainment between our most advantaged and disadvantaged students. There is a need for a broader multidisciplinary approach, including strong psychosocial, social science, and educational research, to address the early onset of reading difficulties for disadvantaged students. Establishing, enhancing, and sustaining reading achievement and reading self-concept are vital ingredients in assisting children to take full advantage of their life potential. The R4L intervention is a structured reading program, with a strong focus on phonological awareness, suitable for primary school children with reading difficulties. The present investigation aimed to: (1) tackle literacy difficulties which limit life potential in the early years of schooling by consolidating, strengthening and implementing a new, innovative early intervention, Reading for Life (R4L), to combat the early onset of reading difficulties for disadvantaged primary school children (Years 1 to 4); (2) comprehensively test the short- and long-term effects of the intervention on diverse reading outcomes for young children (sight word recognition, phonemic awareness, reading accuracy, comprehension, fluency) utilising a mixed methods approach in the context of an experimental design; and (3) evaluate the impact of the intervention on children, based upon qualitative data from multiple sources (principals, teachers, children, volunteers, and parents). Children, supported by an adult volunteer known as a reading buddy, completed a range of sight word, phonological awareness, and reading activities over 15 sessions. A mixed methods research design was adopted, employing two inter-related studies conducted sequentially, to comprehensively answer the central research question: What are the effects of the R4L intervention on children's reading skills, behaviours, and reading self-concepts? Study 1, a quantitative study, used an experimental design to compare the reading achievement scores of experimental (N = 140) and control (N = 113) conditions across two time waves. Results suggest there is an advantage from participating in R4L for children with reading difficulties. Children, across different schools, gender, reading buddies, and time, improved in phonological awareness - an important predictor of future reading success. Study 2, a qualitative study, included semi-structured individual and group interviews with 130 children, parents, teachers, and volunteers. Both direct (children and reading buddies) and indirect (parents and teachers) participants of R4L reported observing a child's improved decoding skills, phonological awareness, confidence, and autonomous reading. Overall, the present investigation demonstrated that the psychosocial reading intervention for children with reading difficulties, R4L, improved children's phonological awareness, confidence, and autonomous reading. Children disadvantaged by their reading difficulties benefit from working with a reading buddy in the R4L program. Hence, the findings imply that R4L is an intervention that can contribute to breaking the cycle of disadvantage for children with reading difficulties.
| Date of Award | 2011 |
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| Original language | English |
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