Abstract
Some pupils fail to obtain reading fluency and/or reading comprehension skills even if they are given access to specialized instruction of high quality. These pupils may have a learning difficulty. Particularly pupils with dyslexia are likely to face problems in one or more cognitive processes, including phonological processing, auditory processing, long-term retrieval, attention, short-term memory, and working memory (Masoura, 2006). In this study we tried to investigate and analyze the problems that pupils with learning difficulties encounter.
Five pupils of 3rd to 4th grade of primary school, from 9 to 10 years of age, (given the names) Chamomile, Poppy, Rosebud, Geranium and Clover, volunteered to participate in this study. The participants were officially diagnosed with dyslexia by an approved centre. Data were collected though interviews which were conducted both with the parents and the educators of the participants in order to collect data regarding the participants' family and school history.
The materials that helped the researcher to identify the reading skills (phonological processing) and reading comprehension level of the participants of this experiment were a text taken from the third and fourth-grade of a reading programme used in the mainstream.
Additionally, there were questions that the researcher posed to the participants in order to check understanding. Last but not least, participants were asked whether they thought these facilitators helped them.
Also we used four flashcards as facilitators in the retelling process. Flashcards utilize metacognitive faculties as well as allow for confidence-based repetition. Therefore, they improve memory performance. The results indicated that pupils with learning difficulties encounter problems in reading comprehension, retelling and working memory. Those problems are more severe in pupils coming from bilingual or socially disadvantaged environments. There are many Bilingual pupils in Greece, mainly refugees, and these pupils take a large part of Greek schools. Especially for these pupils the learning difficulties are more often and their parents faces many problems as they are not familiar with the Greek language but also in their new country's system of education.
As the size of the sample is small, further research is needed in order to establish the impact between the phonological and the verbal memory deficits on reading comprehension of pupils with learning difficulties.