Validity of the California Achievement and Mental Maturity Tests in Predicting Success in Five Different First Year High School Foreign Languages

The acquisition of decoding skills ( sound-symbol correspondence, visual analysis, and blending ) was studied with twelve Ss who scored below average on a battery of psychomotor tests. A group of twelve “no treatment” control Ss were shown to be superior to the experimental Ss in reading simple sight words on a laboratory pretest. Each experimental S required an average of 4 1/2 hours of tutorial time, distributed across forty-three sessions, in learning the program content. Posttest results showed the experimental Ss to be superior to the controls on all measures of decoding and demonstrated that experimental Ss could apply decoding skills to unfamiliar content. The major conclusion drawn is that so-called dyslexic children can learn basic reading skills. The success was attributed to the highly-structured, programmed approach.