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The authors report a short-term reading intervention study involving 15 children with Down syndrome (DS) who attended mainstream schools. The intervention programme taught children phoneme segmentation and blending skills in the context of learning letter-sounds and working with words in books. The children were taught by their learning support assistants, who received special training for this purpose. Compared to a waiting group, a group of eight children with DS improved significantly on measures of early literacy skills (letter-sound knowledge, Early Word Recognition) following eight weeks of intervention. The waiting group started to make progress once they received the intervention. Both groups maintained progress on the literacy measures five months after the intervention had finished. The results suggest that children with DS can benefit from structured, phonics-based reading intervention. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Original publication

DOI

10.1007/s11145-007-9089-3

Type

Journal article

Journal

Reading and Writing

Publication Date

01/06/2008

Volume

21

Pages

395 - 412