Developmental changes of early reading skills in six-year-old polish children and graphogame as a computer-based intervention to support them

Abstract

The aim of this randomised crossover study was to investigate the development of reading skills in chil-dren with low letter knowledge in the first year of their formal reading instruction and to assess the effectiveness of GraphoGame Polish (PL) - intensive computer game-based training in recognition of grapheme-phoneme associations. The results show that even though children with initial poor letter knowledge finally achieved the level of the reference group in terms of letter naming, there was still a significant gap between them in read-ing speed of words and pseudowords. The experiment investigating the training effectiveness did not show significant differences between the GraphoGame playing group and the group playing a maths game in respect to changes in letter knowledge. The reading skills of both groups of players increased between the assessments with a simi-lar pace. © 2014 International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education.