Publications 2016
Teaching decoding to a student with severe speech and physical impairment - a single case study
Children who cannot speak, and use augmentative and alternative communication, need specific support to learn reading and spelling skills. Unfortunately, there are only a few interventions and methods available to help these children. In addition, as in typically developing children, specific reading and spelling problems can occur, such as difficulties in learning the alphabetic principle. Despite former reading and spelling instruction for several years, a 12 year old boy with physical and multiple disabilities who cannot speak was unable to decode unknown/new words, albeit he developed some reading ability by automatically recognizing some highly familiar words. In this study we evaluated the effect of an intervention procedure, based on the Non-verbal Reading Approach, the Whole-to-Part model and a Dutch method for reading and spelling called 'Zo leerje kinderen lezen en spellen', that was developed for him. Instruction and feedback were adapted to teach him to decode the target-words while preventing him to learn to recognize these words automatically. After the intervention, he was able to decode 10 target-words, correctly place letters in these target-words, improve his knowledge of sound-letter correspondence, recognize specific sounds in target-words and identify target-words correctly. His decoding skills also generalized to 12 new words. The effects remained until an 8-week follow-up. The intervention procedure may contribute to the further elaboration of spelling instructions for Dutch children who do not speak and have difficulty in learning the alphabetic principle.
