In our whole-day seminar on reading fluency, several esteemed international guests presented their latest research findings and their implications for applied work in schools and clinics. The day's schedule can be found in the announcement.
Kathy Rastle from Royal Holloway University (London, UK) explained why reading fluency is the necessary link between decoding and reading comprehension and offered concrete advice to support the development of fluency in practical settings.
Minna Torppa from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) showed the different trajectories of reading development that can be observed and discussed the cases of children whose early reading difficulties appear to resolve versus those whose struggles first emerge after the early grades, and how their profiles differ.
Karin Landerl from the University of Graz (Austria) pointed out that many children struggle with both reading and math development, and presented the shared and unique aspects of their profiles as they relate to the shared and unique requirements of reading and math development.
Mads Poulsen from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) presented the Danish national test for diagnosing dyslexia across all educational levels, discussing the content and justification for the test, the reasons for its widespread adoption and success, as well as some challenges arising from its use.
Elise de Bree from the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) reminded us that many (but not all) children with developmental language disorder also struggle with learning to read, and explained that they need targeted help with reading, which is more challenging when language is also weak.
Melanie Kuhn from Purdue University (USA) discussed findings from intervention studies showing that systematic, supported reading practice is needed to improve fluency, and offered concrete advice for efficient interventions based on either repeated or wide reading.
Finally, Athanasios Protopapas and Vasiliki Diamanti from the University of Oslo presented the main applied findings from the BetterReading project, showing that when reading intervention is properly implemented, it can have large and rapid effects on fluency when reading passages sharing vocabulary with the intervention, stressing the implications of this finding for designing and customizing interventions for struggling readers.
Many thanks to all presenters and all attendees for a highly successful event!
