Design and structure of GraphoGame-Flemish, an app-based tool to support early reading acquisition

Digital games have shown to have promising potential as support tools for early reading acquisition in children at risk for or diagnosed with dyslexia. Detailed technical descriptions of these tools are essential to enable comparison of treatment effects across studies with different game content, study designs and target languages. It also helps to uncover which aspects of game-based learning are driving its effectiveness. GraphoGame is a child-friendly computerized tool to support reading acquisition in beginning readers by systematically and explicitly training grapheme-phoneme correspondences. This work provides an in-depth description of the design and structure of a Flemish version of GraphoGame which was created as a preventive intervention for Flemish Dutch-speaking pre-readers at cognitive risk for dyslexia. We designed, envisioned, implemented and piloted a range of new tasks suitable for this aim in this young target population. A lot more weight was given to grapheme and phoneme identification and discrimination which are often overlooked in the training of grapheme-phoneme associations at the core of most other versions of GraphoGame. A cohort of 62 pre-reading children at cognitive risk for dyslexia (average age 5.5 years) trained with GraphoGame-Flemish on average 66 times during a 90-day intervention period. After the playing phase, more than half of these pre-readers reported that the content they played just before the end of the intervention was challenging for them. Nevertheless, they still managed to sustain a median exposure of 15 minutes per playing session over the entire three-month period and given that no child mastered all game levels, GraphoGame-Flemish has the potential to engage at-risk children at the onset of literacy in training their early-reading skills over an extended period of time.

数字游戏已被证明在辅助儿童早期阅读习得方面具有巨大的潜力，尤其是在那些存在阅读障碍风险或已被诊断为阅读障碍的儿童中。这些工具的详细技术描述对于比较不同游戏内容、研究设计和目标语言的研究之间的治疗效果至关重要。同时，这也有助于揭示哪些游戏学习方面的要素是推动其有效性的关键。GraphoGame是一款针对儿童的友好型计算机工具，通过系统性地进行字母与音素对应关系的显性训练，以支持初学者的阅读习得。本研究对GraphoGame的弗拉芒语版本进行了深入的设计和结构描述，该版本作为预防干预措施，旨在帮助弗拉芒语使用者在认知上存在阅读障碍风险的学龄前儿童。我们为此年轻的目标群体设计、构想、实施并试点了一系列适合该目标的新任务。在GraphoGame的字母与音素关联训练中，我们更加重视字母和音素的识别与区分，这在其他版本的GraphoGame中往往被忽视。在为期90天的干预期间，62名存在阅读障碍风险的学龄前儿童（平均年龄为5.5岁）平均使用GraphoGame-Flemish进行了66次训练。在游戏阶段结束后，超过一半的儿童报告称，在干预结束前他们所玩的内容对他们来说具有挑战性。尽管如此，他们仍能在整个三个月的时间里，每次游戏平均持续15分钟。鉴于没有任何孩子能够掌握所有游戏级别，GraphoGame-Flemish有潜力在儿童开始识字学习初期，就让他们在一段较长的时期内持续训练其早期阅读技能。