This study examined the status of current reading, spelling, and phonological processing skills of 28 university students who reported a history of reading acquisition problems. The results indicated that 21 of these participants were currently able to comprehend text at a level expected for university students, although only 8 at a rate comparable to that of university students without a history of reading acquisition problems. In addition, all but two participants showed current problems in two or more of the additional areas examined, including word reading, decoding, spelling, and phonological processing. The performance of ten participants who had a recent diagnosis of reading disability was mostly indistinguishable from the performance of participants without such diagnosis, except on the phonological processing tasks.

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This study involved a qualitative examination of the personal characteristics that university students saw as important in helping them to compensate for their reading difficulties at various stages of their education. The sample consisted of 10 undergraduate students or recent graduates who reported a significant history of reading difficulties. Data were collected using in-depth, open-ended interviews with each participant. These data were then analyzed using a form of whole text analysis and resulted in four major themes: seeking assistance from others, de-veloping positive relationships with others, being highly motivated to achieve, and maintaining a belief in one’s abilities. The findings highlight the broad range of factors that can influence motivation and self-concept and the wide variety of people who can be involved in providing assistance to individuals with reading difficulties. The implications of the findings for educational practice and for fur-ther research are discussed.

Written expression is an essential skill to actively function in today's society. For many learners, especially those with a learning disability (LD), writing can be a source of frustration. Technology in its various forms, holds promise to assist students in this area. The current study examines the role that tablet technology, specifically, iPads, has on the writing skills of students who have an LD. Using a visual analysis approach and paired-sample t-tests, the current study examines how the writing of nine (female = 1, age = 12.5; male = 8; mean age = 11.5) grade six Caucasian students from Northern Ontario with an LD differs when they write by hand versus writing with an iPad. Specifically, the study examines whether there is a difference in (a) writing productivity; (b) spelling accuracy; (c) lexical diversity; (d) syntactical complexity; and, (e) ideas expressed. Results revealed that digital writing using an iPad was effective in significantly improving spelling accuracy, number of T-units and number of ideas expressed. There was also an insignificant improvement in the areas of writing productivity, number of sentences written, and grammatical errors. The results of the current study suggest that the use of iPads has a positive influence on' writing. Therefore, the use of iPads may have long-term effects that cannot be measured sufficiently in a short-term study.

We examined whether university students who report a significant history of reading difficulties (RD; n = 24) differed from university students with no history of reading difficulties (NRD; n = 31) in how sentence context affects word recognition. Experiment 1 found no differences in how congruent sentence primes or syntactic manipulations of the sentence primes affected the performance of the two groups. However, only the RD group displayed a significant inhibition effect when the target word was preceded by an incongruent sentence prime. Experiment 2 found that the groups differed in how meaning frequency of the target word and context strength of the sentence prime affected word recognition latencies. The results suggest that the RD participants' performance is context-sensitive and better explained by interactive models of language processing than by modular models.