The Intervention Research On Children With Reading Disability Of Character Recognition Problem

Studies about reading disability are still at the exploring stage, so most researches at present have concentrated on comparing the differences between normal children and those with reading disability in each field of psychology and physiology associated with reading disability, and on studying the own abilities of children with reading disability. At today's information age, it is not merely a kind of study ability to read, but also foundation of all discipline, and an individual's indispensable basic viability. Therefore the appearance of reading disability may influence knowledge learning, even the adaptation of life. Reading disability children do not only go through the puzzlement in study, but also bear the enormous emotional trauma brought from this problem;they can not enjoy reading, and even often lose chances to develop other latent abilities, which will certainly exert great influences to the development of those children's cognition, emotion, self- concept and social abilities. All these require researchers paying more attention to those children with reading disability. This paper is just about an intervention study to reading disability children with the problem of character recognition.What this research adopts are measurements before and after intervention of an experimental group, a control group and a normal group. First of all, the researcher screens 34 reading disability pupils in Grade Three with the problem of character recognition from Wuchang borough in Wuhan city, who are divided into the intervention group or control group at random. There is no prominent difference between intervention group and control group in age, the amount of recognized characters and PRS. Secondly, after consulting with parents, 9 pupils (5 males and 4 females) would like to try on the intervention train. Finally, from January to May of 2006, the researcher has been carrying on the intervention training to these pupils for 4 months in the learning ability training centre of Hospital of Central China Normal University. The intervention includes two parts respectively for the students and their parents: the interventions of students mainly include training of perception process and character recognition strategies;while the intervention of parents is group counseling of parents' efficiency. The training of perception process is divided into visual and auditive training. And character recognition strategies mainly include the following five: basic skills of character recognition, skills to make sense of characters, skills to recognize characters by fonts and pronunciations, skills to recognize characters through basic font styles and association strategies. After intervention, the researcher chooses 24 medium-level pupils as the normal group, and then takes the after measurement to the intervention group, the control group, and the normal group. The after measurement includes amount of recognized characters, PRS and relevant speech abilities.The results are the following:(1) As for the amount of recognized characters, after intervention training, the scores of intervention group are prominent higher than control group;while in comparing with normal group, the level of intervention group is prominently lower than the normal group, which indicates that the character recognition ability of the intervention group has progressed to some extent, but still does not is reach the level of the normal children. In a word, intervention training can improve the amount of recognized characters of reading disability pupils with character recognition problem.(2) According to evaluation by teachers on the Speech Disorder sub-scale of Scale of Learning Disorders for Teachers, there is no prominent difference between the scores of intervention group and control group.(3) On the phonetic awareness, after intervention training, the scores of intervention group are prominent higher than those of control group;In comparing with normal group, there is no prominent difference between the intervention group and normal group, which indicates that it is effective to train the intervention group in pronunciation.(4) On the language learning ability, after intervention training, scores of intervention group is prominent higher than those of control group;while compared with the normal group, the level of intervention group is still prominent lower than the normal group, which shows that teaching of strategies of character recognition during the intervention training improves the language learning abilities of reading disability pupils with character recognition problem(5) In the three aspects of learning ability, in the coordination system of vision -movement, scores of intervention group are prominent higher than those of control group. In the test of "finding out '3'", there is no prominent difference between the intervention group and the control group, which is the same with intervention group and the normal group. And in the test of "reciting numbers", the differences between intervention group and control group or the normal group are rather prominent.(6) In all the tests mentioned above, the correlation between amount of character recognition and phonetic awareness, Chinese character awareness or scores of "reciting numbers" test, and the correlation coefficient are .31(P<.05), .71(P<.01), .28(P<.05), respectively. While the correlation between amount of character recognition and scores of "finding out '3'" test, coordination system of vision - movement is not high enough to become prominent.