The primary purpose of the present review was to determine why conflicting findings have been reported regarding the long-term effects of phonological awareness training for children from low socioeconomic status families (low-SES) and children with familial risk for reading impairment. Four aspects of intervention were analyzed for each of the studies: service delivery, content of intervention, length of sessions, and total number of sessions. The second purpose of the review was to determine which aspects of intervention had the largest effect on improving later reading skills as well as if general aspects were beneficial to both at-risk groups or if there were population-specific factors. A total of ten intervention studies, five involving children from low-SES and five involving children with familial risk for reading impairment, were reviewed. Of the ten interventions reviewed, only three interventions, two involving children from low-SES and one involving children at familial risk for reading impairment, demonstrated successful long-term effects on reading. The remaining interventions demonstrated differences across the four aspects analyzed and conflicting long-term outcomes. As no population specific factors were observed across studies, the similarities found in the three successful interventions suggest that a general intervention program can be beneficial for both populations of at-risk children. / text

In this thesis four children, between the ages of 6 and 7, identified as at risk for language or reading impairment, participated in a bilingual intervention. The bilingual literacy intervention included a grammatical component that incorporated past tense verb, noun phrase, and prepositional phrase instruction. The children completed a sentence repetition test (SRT), which allowed examiners to measure grammatical progress over the coarse of the intervention. Overall SRT results showed that moderate grammatical gains were made during the intervention. The study also provided data on the sensitivity of SRT in targeted grammatical areas. The results showed that the past tense verb and noun phrase portions of the SRT had low sensitivity to progress. These findings suggest that clinicians can use SRT to measure overall progress; however, supplemental tasks should be used to evaluate past tense verb and noun phrase abilities in English-dominant bilingual children with language or reading impairment. / text

This thesis includes three empirical studies that have all aimed to increase the understanding of the interactions and connections between self-concepts, reading impairment, psychological health and Assistive Technology (AT). The use of applications in tablets as assistive technology to facilitate reading and compensate for reading impairment and its impact on the participants’ self-concepts and psychological health as well as on their reading abilities was also of interest. The first study included 67 pupils in school years 4-9. They were assessed by the Beck Youth Inventory (BYI) regarding self-image, anxiety and depression. The results showed no deviance from age-equivalent norm group scores. The second study included 35 pupils in school years 4-6. This study aimed at investigating the transfer effects on decoding and general reading ability after 20 intervention sessions where AT (applications in tablets) were used. Results showed that the decoding ability had progressed at the same rate as that of the norm group. The results also showed that using AT increased motivations to learn, as well as independence and improved family climate. The third study was a randomized control study (RCT) with 137 participants in school years 4, 8 and high school. The results showed that reading impaired children and adolescents to a great extent, but not completely unanimously, did not depict any different self-image or self-esteem than peers with an expected reading ability of the same age. Self-esteem was investigated by the Cultural Free Self Esteem Inventory (CFSEI-3). The CFSEI-3 scores showed no effect by interventions with AT. The results also showed that there were no signs of depression, assessed by BYI, in the investigated groups, but somewhat inconclusive results regarding anxiety where the school-year 4 group depicted higher levels of anxiety. The results generally showed a more positive depiction than what previous studies within the field have presented, which was interpreted as being due to the development of efficient pedagogical strategies and supportive attitudes in the school context, as well as among family members or peers.

Public libraries belong to the so-called public library system and must ensure that people with functional variations have access to literature in various formats but also technical solutions that enable the person to assimilate the literature (SFS, 2013: 801). What opportunities do public libraries have to keep up with the development of technology for people with reading disabilities? The technological development has in recent years gone very fast and the public libraries financial resources has not increased in the same way as the technology development instead has the financial resource decreased (Hansson and Linder, 2019).  The purpose of the study is to gain an increased understanding of inclusive activities within library activities for people with reading and writing difficulties. The question: What services and aids do public libraries offer on their websites for people with reading disabilities?  The study is a qualitative content analysis and an empirical inductive approach and where the collected material forms a pattern which in turn can be divided into categories (Patel and Davidson, 2011).  The results show that there is a big difference between the aids that public libraries advertise on their websites. Most of the public libraries advertise on their websites that they have E-books, E-textbooks and Daisy-books. There are some public libraries who advertise having several formats of books, for example cd-books, tactile books and braille-books.

This study investigated the validity of measures that were hypothesized to account for significant variance in English reading ability. During kindergarten, 63 bilingual Hispanic children completed letter identification, English and Spanish phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and sentence repetition static assessment tasks. They also completed a dynamic assessment nonsense-word decoding task that yielded pretest to posttest gain score, response to decoding strategy, and temporally related working memory information. One week prior to kindergarten, information was gathered regarding socioeconomic status, preschool attendance, English and Spanish language dominance, and language ability. At the end of first grade, the same children completed word identification, decoding, and reading fluency tasks designed to represent the narrow view of reading. Reliability, content relevancy, construct validity, and predictive evidence of validity were examined. The letter identification task, the English-only and Spanish-only tasks, and a composite of the participants' best English and Spanish scores accounted for significant variance in first-grade word-level reading. However, the Spanish and BLS static measures did not account for significant, unique variance over and above English-only static measures, and the English-only static measures did not account for significant, unique variance over and above the letter identification static measure. The dynamic assessment measure pertaining to the response to reading strategy instruction accounted for equivalent variance in first-grade word-level reading when compared to a combination of letter identification and BLS static measures. The dynamic assessment measure yielded the highest classification accuracy, with sensitivity and specificity at or above 80% for all three formative criterion reading measures, including 100% sensitivity for two out of the three first-grade measures. The dynamic assessment of reading strategy surfaced as a parsimonious, valid means of predicting first-grade word-level reading ability for Hispanic, bilingual children. When compared to multiple English, Spanish, and BLS static measures, the dynamic measure accounted for equivalent variance in the majority of first-grade reading measures and had superior classification accuracy.

Avhandlingens övergripande syfte var att undersöka fonologisk medvetenhet och skriftspråklig förmåga hos talande eller icke-talande barn, med lässvårigheter eller motoriska talsvårigheter. De huvudsakliga fynden i denna avhandling var: (1) För barn med lässvårigheter som befinner sig på en tidig nivå i sin läsutveckling bör intervention kring läs- och skrivförmågor fokusera på barnets svaghet snarare än styrkan vad gäller ordavkodning. (2) För barn med lässvårigheter hade såväl fonologisk som ortografisk intervention effekt på förmågan att läsa och skriva. Fonologisk intervention hade effekt även på barnen med lägst läsförmåga. (3) För barn med motoriska talsvårigheter var det signifikanta skillnader mellan de bästa och de sämsta läsarna vad gäller auditiv fonemdiskrimination och generella språkförmågor. (4) För barn med motoriska talsvårigheter hade fonologisk intervention effekt på förmågan att stava ord men inte på läsförmågan. (5) I en analys av nonsensord undersöktes stavfel hos en flicka med anartri. Fler stavfel återfanns i längre ord och en högre grad av fel återfanns i mitten av ord, vilket tyder på svårigheter med arbetsminne och med att segmentera ord. Fynden diskuteras i relation till fonologisk informationsbearbetning inom fyra delområden: fonologiska representationer, fonologisk produktion, fonologiskt minne och fonologisk medvetenhet. Talets betydelse för läs- och skrivförmågan är komplex. Även ett gravt avvikande tal kan ge fonologisk återkoppling och för barn med anartri tycks bristen på tal spela en viss roll. Denna avhandling har ett handikappvetenskapligt synsätt och bidrar till den övergripande förståelsen av fonologisk medvetenhet och skriftspråklig förmåga. Flera av fynden är direkt applicerbara i kliniska sammanhang. / The general aim of this thesis was to explore phonological awareness and written language in the presence and absence of speech in children with reading impairments and children with motor speech impairments. The main findings of the present thesis were: (1) For children with reading impairments who are at an early stage of reading development, interventions targeting reading and spelling should focus on their weakness rather than their strength in word decoding. (2) For children with reading impairments, phonological as well as orthographic intervention had effects on reading and spelling. The children with the lowest reading performance also showed effects of phonological intervention. (3) For children with motor speech impairments, significant differences were shown between low level readers and high level readers in the areas of auditory phoneme discrimination skills and general language skills. (4) For children with motor speech impairments, phonological intervention had effect on word spelling skills but not on reading skills. (5) In an analysis of non-word spelling errors of a girl with anarthria, more spelling errors were found on longer words, and a higher proportion of spelling errors were found in medial letter positions, implying deficit in segmentation of spoken words and working memory. The findings were discussed in relation to four subfields of phonological processing: phonological representations, phonological production, phonological memory and phonological awareness. The contributions of speech to reading and spelling are complex. Even a severely distorted speech can serve as a phonological feedback and for children with anarthria, the lack of speech does seem to play a role. The present thesis has a disability research approach and is a contribution to the overall understanding of phonological awareness and written language. Many of the findings are directly applicable to the clinical context.