«Intervention in reading processes in pupils with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)»

Víctor M. Acosta Rodríguez, Gustavo M. Ramírez Santana, Nayarit del Valle Hernández y Laura de Castro Bermúdez
«Intervention in reading processes in pupils with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)»
Psicothema, vol. 28, n.º 1, 2016

Psicothema | Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos del Principado de Asturias | Oviedo | ESPAÑA


Extracto de páginas 40-41 y 44-45 del artículo en PDF

«During the early stages of education, reading is a fundamental objective for all pupils. However, there are risk groups who suffer serious difficulties for effective learning. These include children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), who are characterized by having a considerable delay in their language development, despite the absence of neurological, sensory or non-verbal intelligence deficits (Leonard, 2014). Many studies have found reading problems in these pupils (Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002). In fact, oral language problems have a negative impact on reading, especially when phonological disturbances appear together with related lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic, and narrative aspects (Coloma et al., 2012).

»Research data confirm that reading problems in SLI are mixed (Bishop & Snowling, 2004), that is, the causes should be sought in the interaction of decoding and comprehension skills. First, a close relationship has been established between reading and phonological processing skills. In this sense, it was found that phonological representations constitute an area of weakness in children with SLI, although not to the degree of severity reached in other disorders such as dyslexia (Claessen & Leitao, 2012).

»Second, other components have been linked to reading difficulties in these children, and more specifically with respect to their lexicalsemantic, grammatical and narrative deficits, that cause severe problems of reading comprehension (Ramus, Marshall, Rosen, & van der Lely, 2013). Further, longitudinal studies confirm that differences between children with SLI and their peers increase over time (Flax et al., 2003).

»A review of the research on reading intervention shows that interventions combining phonological training with reading improve skills in poor readers. However, there is less empirical evidence of the effectiveness of intervention in children with SLI with respect to difficulties in grammatical and semantic processes.

»In this case, it is important to train receptive and expressive language skills to improve reading comprehension. Bowyer-Crane et al. (2008) studied the effectiveness of two training programs for improving reading skills in children with SLI. The first combined phonological awareness activities with reading books, while the second focused on helping improve oral language skills, that is, vocabulary, inferencing, expressive language and listening skills. The first program led to improved letter identification and phonological awareness, while the second optimized lexical and grammatical skills. Currently, most intervention programs combine stimulation of phonological awareness and reading skills with oral language training (Hulme & Snowling, 2011; Clarke, Truelove, Hulme, & Snowling, 2014).

»The above considerations were taken into account when designing the present study for Spanish-speaking children with SLI. Specifically, the main objective was to improve reading processes of children with SLI by an intervention program.

[...]

»According to the two-dimensional model proposed by Bishop and Snowling (2004), in which a close relationship is established between reading and language disorders, phonological defi cits affect decoding skills, while deficits in other components of language constitute risk factors for reading comprehension problems. In this sense, we should reflect on the first hypothesis of the present research. The results of the initial evaluation are worse in the SLI group than in the control group, with significant differences in all reading processes evaluated by the PROLEC-R (Cuetos et al., 2009). This corroborates the presence of mixed reading problems in the experimental group, with deficits that affect both decoding and comprehension, in line with data from other studies with Spanish-speaking children (Coloma et al., 2012).

»The second hypothesis was linked to the effectiveness of the intervention program on the reading processes of children with SLI. The results obtained in our study are similar to those of authors like Hulme and Snowling (2011), whose proposals combined oral language activities and reading texts. More specifically, it should be noted that significant gains were observed in precisely those processes and tasks that are most vulnerable in these pupils. Thus, for example, they clearly improved their nonword reading. Much research has been done on the limitations that SLI places on the ability to store information in the phonological working memory, a fact that hinders phonological representations and consequently weakens acquisition of vocabulary, morphosyntax and reading fluency (Leonard, 2014). The activities aimed at optimizing grapheme-phoneme association, naming speed and reading words and nonwords in both the ALE program (González & Cuetos, 2008) and Leer en un clic (García de Castro & Cuetos, 2012) led to considerable improvements in reading achieved by the sublexical means.

»Significant differences were also obtained in the syntactic processes, and more specifi cally in grammatical structures. Not surprisingly, the core of linguistic problems in SLI coincides with morphosyntactic problems (Washington, 2013); therefore, improving knowledge of the syntactic roles of the words that make up sentences and syntactic processing are important. In this sense, a decisive factor in the intervention program was the incorporation of activities linked to developing narrative and morphosyntax.

»Finally, children in the SLI group made considerable gains in semantic processes, specifically in sentence and text comprehension, aspects that receive special attention in levels 2 and 3 of Leer en un clic (García de Castro & Cuetos, 2012). While it is important to understand different types of sentences, the linguistic profi le of this disorder is such that improvement in text comprehension is considered more fundamental, as it indicates an ability to extract meaning from texts and integrate it into one’s own knowledge. However, there was no major progress in listening (oral comprehension). The explanation for this fi nding could be related to the usual limitations faced by children with SLI in temporal auditory speech processing, in the resources available in working memory, and in the management of inferences. In this sense, we would suggest incorporating into the program more attention to the teaching of vocabulary and improving working memory (López Escribano, Elosúa Gómez-Veiga, & García-Madruga, 2013); the generation of inferences (Hulme & Snowling, 2011); and finally, the formulation of questions and greater use of figurative language (Clarke, Truelove, Hulme, & Snowling, 2014).

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