Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences

search-icon

An Intervention Program Related to Reading Development: A Case Study of a Child with Williams Syndrome

Open access
The present paper is related to a case study of an 8-year-old girl with Williams syndrome and mild intellectual disability. Initial informal assessments and standardized tests indicated that her reading ability was underdeveloped, as well as her phonological awareness. Hence, an intervention for the development of reading skills was designed according to the principles of the ‘top-down’ educational model, combining features from several teaching methods, such as ‘holistic approach’, ‘holistic-analytical method’, and ‘whole-word teaching’. The student’s progress was recorded in the researcher’s journal and evaluated through informal continuous assessment and standardized test. She managed to read 45 out of 65 words, which were included in the intervention, simple syllables with the consonant-vowel sequence and some simple two-syllable words without any complex content, not included in the intervention. The intervention proved to be effective, as the student indicated development in her reading skills, although to a certain degree. Finally, the results verified the influence of the phonological factor in reading and highlighted the holist approach as an appropriate way to develop reading and comprehension skills.
Barca, L., Ellis, A. W., & Burani, C. (2007). Context-sensitive rules and word naming in Italian children. Reading and Writing. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 20, 495–509.
Becerra, A. M., John, A. E., Peregrine, E., Mervis, C. B. (2008). Reading abilities of 9–17-year-olds with Williams syndrome. Impact of reading method. Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.
Brock, J. (2007). Language abilities in Williams syndrome. A critical review. Development and Psychopathology, 19, 97–127.
Forster, K. I., (1976). Accessing the mental lexicon. In RJ Wales & EW Walker (Eds.) New approaches to language mechanisms (pp.257-287). Amsterdam. North Holland.
Crawford, J. R., & Howell, D. C. (1998). Comparing an individual’s test score against norms derived from small samples. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 12(4), 482–486.
Herwegen, J. V., Farran, E., Annaz, D. (2011). Item and error analysis on Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices in Williams Syndrome. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32, 93–99.
Laing, E., Hulme, C., Grant, J., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2001). Learning to read in Williams Syndrome. Looking beneath the surface of atypical reading development Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 729-739.
Levy, Y., & Antebi, V. (2004). Word reading and reading-related skills in Hebrew- speaking adolescents with Williams syndrome. Neurocase, 10, 444-451.
Marini, A., Martelli, S., Gagliardi, C., Fabbro, F., & Borgatti R. (2010). Narrative language in Williams Syndrome and its neuropsychological correlates. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 23, 97–111.
Menghini, D., Verucci, L., & Vicari, S. (2004). Reading and phonological awareness in Williams syndrome. Neuropsychology, 18, 29-37.
Mervis, C. B. (2009). Language and literacy development of children with Williams syndrome. Topics in Language Disorders, 29, 149–169.
Mervis, C. B., Robinson, B. F., Rowe, M. L., Becerra, A. M., & Klein-Tasman, B. P. (2003). Language abilities of individuals who have Williams syndrome. In. Abbeduto L, editor. International Review of Research in Mental Retardation. Orlando, FL. Academic Press.
Mervis, C. B., & Becerra, A. M. (2007). Language and communicative development in Williams syndrome. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 13, 3–15.
Pinheiro, A.P., Galdo-Alvarez, S., Sampaio, A., Niznikiewicz, M., & Goncalves, O.F. (2010). Electrophysiological correlates of processing in Williams syndrome. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 31, 1412-1425.
Pleh, C., Lukacs, A., & Racsmany, M. (2003). Morphological patterns in Hungarian children with Williams syndrome and the rule debates. Brain and Language, 86, 377–383.
Porter, M., & Dodd, H. (2011). A longitudinal study of cognitive abilities in Williams Syndrome. Developmental Neuropsychology, 36(2), 255-272.
Raven, J. C., Court, J. H., & Raven, J. C. (1990). Manual for Raven’s progressive matrices and vocabulary scales—section 2. Colored progressive matrices. Oxford. Oxford Psychologists Press.
Rhodes, S. M., Riby, D. M., Park, J., Fraser, E., & Campbell, L. E. (2010). Executive neuropsychological functioning in individuals with Williams syndrome. Neuropsychology, 48, 1216-1226.
Rossi, N. F., Sampaio, A., Goncalves, O. F., & Giacheti, C. M. (2011). Analysis on speech fluency in Williams syndrome. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32, 2957-2962.
Stojanovik, V. (2010). Understanding and production of prosody in children with Williams syndrome. A developmental trajectory approach. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 23, 112-126.
Stojanovik, V., & Ewijk, L. (2008). Do children with Williams syndrome have unusual vocabularies? Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 18–34.
Stromme, P., Bjornstad, P. G., & Ramstad, K. (2002). Prevalence estimations of Williams syndrome. Journal of Child Neurology, 17,269-271.
Temple, C. M., Almazan, M., & Sherwood, S. (2002). Lexical skills in Williams syndrome. a cognitive neuropsychological analysis. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15, 463-495.
Ypsilanti, A., Grouios, G., Alevriadou, A., & Tsapkini, K. (2005). Expressive and receptive vocabulary in children with Williams and Down syndromes. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 49, 353-364.
In-Text Citation: (Alevriadou & Massi, 2013)
To Cite this Article: Alevriadou, A., & Massi, M. (2013). An Intervention Program Related to Reading Development – A Case Study of a Child with Williams Syndrome. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 1(1), 86–100.