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 children 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 reading 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 similar pace. The analysis of levels' difficulty showed that differentiating between phonologically similar letters was more difficult than between visually similar letters for learners with reading acquisition difficulties. The findings of this study in comparison to other similar studies conducted for other languages are discussed together with its limitations and possible modifications which could improve GraphoGame efficacy for Polish poor readers.