Abstract:

Galexia is evidence-based software for intervention in reading fluency and comprehension, developed as App for Education; it gives support to an intervention program focused in literacy skills improvement. This program has shown effectiveness improving fluency skills in reading disabled people from different ages. It also seems to improve reading related skills: comprehension, phonological awareness, and prosody.

This paper describes Galexia software development and empirical validation in literacy intervention in Primary school children, and beyond that age in late primary, secondary education and adults. The intervention program behind Galexia software design combines both repeated and accelerated reading approaches in an intensive, structured and sequential training at syllable, word and text reading levels. Additionally, it includes phonological skills training. Improving fluency is especially interesting in transparent orthographies like Spanish, in which fluency problems are more salient and can be a more evident manifestation of dyslexia in late ages. Galexia software efficiency will be compared across age.

Method:
Fifty participants with reading disabilities (dyslexia and poor readers) of different ages participated in an intervention study testing the program. They were tested in a pretest-postest study, including measures of reading accuracy and fluency at word, pseudoword and text level, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and prosodic knowledge.

Results:
Galexia seems to help improving fluency measures at word, pseudoword and text level in all ages. Results also indicate improvements in reading comprehension in children from 2nd to 6th grade. In older participants and adults the improvement of comprehension is mediated by the progress of prosodic skills.

Conclusions:
Galexia experience-based program, though focused in reading fluency, shows to successfully enhance fluency and reading related skills along different ages, even in adult people with dyslexia. The design, relevance and implications of this intervention program are discussed.

Keywords:

Fluency, Intervention, Training study, Dyslexia, Reading disability.