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An intervention study was conducted toinvestigate whether children with Down syndrome(DS) would benefit from an `analytic' approachto reading instruction, which encompassedexplicit training in phonological awareness.Participants were seven English-speakingchildren with DS aged 8;6 (years;months) to11;1, who demonstrated little or nononword-reading ability prior to intervention.The children received weekly instruction (forsix weeks) in reading aloud 30 regularly speltmonosyllables (e.g., ten, bake) using an`analytic' approach, in which words werelearned by combining onsets with rimes (fourchildren), or a `whole-word' approach (threechildren). Participants' oral reading wasassessed pre- and post-intervention using areading test comprising the 30 trained wordsand 30 untrained (generalisation) words. Mostchildren (six out of seven) read more trainingwords correctly after intervention than before,with significant improvement shown by fourchildren (two trained analytically, and twotrained with whole words). More importantly,reading of generalisation words improvedsignificantly in only three children, all ofwhom had received analytic training. It wasconcluded that children with DS benefit from ananalytic approach to reading instruction, eventhough their auditory-verbal memory (assessedusing digit span) is poor.
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