Boosting Reading Fluency: An intervention case study at subword level

This study is an intervention case study of fluency in Finnish-speaking children with dyslexia. Two 7-year-old children, a girl and a boy, were selected from the jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. The intervention emphasised syllables as reading units, and proceeded from reading syllables to reading words and text. Letter knowledge, reading skills (syllables, words, pseudo-words, and text reading), and syllable segmentation of words were measured before, immediately after, and three months after the intervention. The results showed that the intervention mainly affected fluency at the syllable level. The girl also showed some improvements in fluency (accuracy, speed) at the word and text reading level, too, while the boy improved in reading accuracy. Children with reading difficulties appear to benefit from fluency intervention; this should initially be based on emphasising syllables as a sublexical reading unit. However, the intervention should be sufficiently long-lasting, progressing piecemeal toward bigger reading units.