The effects of modified Orton -Gillingham instructional strategies on phonological processing deficits in a first-year college Spanish student

Vera Cecilia Castro, Purdue University

Abstract

This study sought to determine the effectiveness of the modified Orton-Gillingham program on foreign language learning for college students who experience language learning disabilities enrolled in first year Spanish. A college student with visual and auditory dyslexia was chosen to participate in this investigation. A single A-B design with maintenance and post-maintenance phases was selected to illustrate the instructional effectiveness of this modified program on phonological awareness including correct spelling and pronunciation in Spanish and reading comprehension. The overall results indicated that the participant displayed an increase in letter spelling when spelling words from a list. However, the same results were not observed with word pronunciation during the oral reading of the reading passages and with reading comprehension skills during the oral and silent reading tasks. These results indicate that the Orton-Gillingham had no impact either on word pronunciation or on reading comprehension skills for this participant. Nevertheless, the participant reported that the modified Orton-Gillingham instruction did help her with reading skills in Spanish. She indicated that instruction provided during the study was a useful supplement to in-class instruction. An important implication to this study is that this is the first time an attempted to systematize and apply the adaptation of the Orton-Gillingham method to French presented in Myer et al. (1989), which is a theoretical procedure, was made. One limitation associated with this investigation is the participation of only one student due to difficulties with recruitment beyond the control of the investigator. More participants were necessary in order to establish functional relationship so that findings could be generalized. Consequently, this is deemed a pilot study. It is recommended that a blending task can either be used for data collection or replace the segmentation task used in this investigation in order to promote reading comprehension skills in future applications of the Orton-Gillingham method for Spanish instruction.* *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Macromedia.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Garfinkel, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Language arts|Language|Special education|Curricula|Teaching

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