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Reading and Writing

, Volume 31, Issue 6, pp 1319–1341 | Cite as

Finger-writing intervention impacts the spelling and handwriting skills of children with developmental language disorder: a multiple single-case study

  • Marie Van Reybroeck
  • Nathalie Michiels
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Learning to use grapheme to phoneme correspondences (GPCs) provides a powerful mechanism for the foundation of reading skills in children. However, for some children, such as those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), the GPC learning process takes time, is laborious, and impacts the entire reading and spelling processes. The present study aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of a finger-writing intervention on reading, spelling and handwriting performances. A visuomotor support was designed to help them to learn more efficiently GPCs since children with DLD appear to have altered phonological representations in memory. Over a period of two months, five children with DLD from a special primary school (aged from 7.42 years to 10.17 years) received individually either a finger-writing intervention or a control intervention, both focusing on phonological awareness and the learning of specific GPCs. In the finger-writing intervention, the child had to explore with their fingers the shape of relief-graphemes and excavated-letter. In the control intervention, the same exercises were made except that the two finger-writing tasks were replaced by two visual discrimination tasks. Children were compared on several measures (reading, spelling, handwriting and phonological awareness) before and after the treatment. Results indicated that the children from the finger-writing intervention showed greater improvement than the children from the control group in learning GPCs to improve their graphemic spelling and, for two of the three children, in handwriting. These findings have a clear practical implication for teachers' instructional practices at school.

Keywords

Finger-writing Handwriting Spelling Developmental language disorder Intervention 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the children, teacher and principals for their support and participation, and C. Gosse for comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université Catholique de LouvainLouvain-la-NeuveBelgium

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