A randomized controlled trial of three theoretically motivated interventions for children with reading comprehension difficulties

This study will compare the effectiveness of three interventions designed to improve the text comprehension skills of poor comprehenders. Poor comprehenders show difficulties with text comprehension despite being able to decode words accurately. Approximately 10 per cent of primary school aged children fit this profile. Year 4 poor comprehenders will be randomly assigned to one of four groups.
The first group will receive oral language training and the second group will receive text comprehension training.
The third group will receive a combined oral language and text comprehension training program and the fourth group will be a waiting control group.
The waiting control group will allow us to examine whether improvements in text comprehension seen in the intervention groups are significantly greater than improvements which occur in the absence of intervention. At the end of the study the waiting control group will receive the most effective intervention.
The interventions will be given by teaching assistants and the groups will complete reading, language and cognitive measures before the 20 week intervention and on three occasions during and after the intervention.
The results of the study will be disseminated to local teachers and speech and language therapists through seminars and workshops.