Enhancing the reading fluency and comprehension of children with reading disabilities in an orthographically transparent language

Breznitz (2006) demonstrated that Hebrew-speaking adults with reading disabilities benefited from a training in which reading rate was experimentally manipulated. In the present study, the authors examine whether silent reading training enhances the sentence reading rate and comprehension of children with reading disabilities and whether results found in Hebrew equally apply to an orthographically transparent language. Training results of 59 Dutch children with reading disabilities and normally achieving children show that children with reading disabilities are able to increase their sentence reading rate with high comprehension levels when pushed to do so with accelerated reading training. Posttest results show that transfer to routine reading is less strong for both accelerated and unaccelerated reading. Only accelerated training allows children with reading disabilities to read at high speed while maintaining high comprehension levels.