Assessing the Effectiveness of Two Theoretically Motivated Computer‐Assisted Reading Interventions in the United Kingdom: GG Rime and GG Phoneme

Abstract

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. There is increasing recognition of the importance of evidence-based technological tools that can aid children's learning and provide individualised instruction and practice (Beddington, et al., 2008;Hasselbring & Goin, 2004;Torgesen & Barker, 1995). If such technological tools are engineered so that progression depends on current learning, with slower learners given more learning opportunities, then such learning technologies also enable effective support for struggling learners (Connor, et al., 2009). These technological tools also ensure fidelity to the teaching programme, enabling them to be used to compare different theoretical approaches to certain kinds of instruction. Here, we compare two theoretically-driven forms of a computer-assisted reading intervention (CARI). Both Permanent repository linkCARIs were intended to help to automatize children's grapheme-phoneme conversion skills for reading and spelling English words. However, the two CARIs varied according to whether they explicitly used rhyme to support grapheme-phoneme instruction. One game was focused on phoneme-level connections between letters and sounds. The second game introduced and reinforced grapheme-phoneme connections via rhyming word families, explicitly focusing on orthographic rime units (the spelling units for rhyming sounds) and demonstrating how rime units and graphemephoneme connections are related in English spelling.The two English CARIs compared here were based on a successful CARI for teaching and automatizing letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness called (http://grapholearning.info/graphoworld) has now been formed to enable games in multiple languages to be developed, also with the aim of free delivery to the end-user.However, implementation of GraphoGame in a non-transparent orthography likeEnglish is more challenging than implementing GrapoGame in Finnish, and this challenge led directly to the small-scale study reported here.For the current study, GraphoGame was adapted for the non-transparentEnglish orthography by English-speaking researchers in two independent research centres. In one centre (Finland), GraphoGame was adapted according to the theoretical view that a "small units first" approach is most effective for learning English phonics (Hulme et al., 2002;Seymour & Duncan, 1997). This CARI, hereafter GraphoGame Phoneme (GG Phoneme), was created by adapting the Finnish CARI format (based on tuition in single grapheme-phoneme correspondences, GPCs) directly to the English orthography. GG Phoneme used the Finnish method of first introducing all the possible GPCs in the spelling system including digraphs, but ordered them so that the most frequent, consistent and prototypical GPCs in English were introduced first (Erskine & Seymour, 2005; see Methods for more detail). In a second centre (Cambridge, UK), GraphoGame was adapted according to the theoretical view that English-speaking children may ben...

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