Effects of oral language intervention on oral language skills and reading comprehension : a randomized controlled trial

Abstract

The present intervention study evaluated the effectiveness of oral language intervention in Cantonese-English bilingual children for improving their reading comprehension and oral language skills. Using a randomized controlled trial design, 31 Hong Kong fifth graders with reading comprehension difficulties or average reading skills were randomly allocated to the intervention group or the control group. Participants in the intervention group received 45- minute group intervention for eight weeks, targeting on vocabulary, reciprocal teaching and spoken language skills. The intervention group was compared to the control group which did not receive any intervention. Reading comprehension, vocabulary definition, oral sentence construction and narrative production task in Chinese and English were administered to the participants before and after intervention. In contrast to the control group, the intervention group improved significantly in reading comprehension, vocabulary definition and oral sentence construction task in both Chinese and English. Furthermore, there was no reading comprehension gap between poor readers and average readers after intervention. These findings highlight the effectiveness of oral language intervention for children with reading comprehension difficulties.