Aphasia Reading Club Outcomes: Acquisition and Use of Metacognitive Reading Strategies

Aphasia is a language disorder acquired due to a neurologic condition that disrupts the understanding and use of semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological knowledge of language. As a result, individuals with aphasia find it challenging to understand, speak, read, and write language. The Aphasia Reading Club (ARC) is an opportunity offered by the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic for people with mild to moderate aphasia to develop their reading skills within a group setting. Research shows that therapy, especially group therapy, develops reading abilities in people with aphasia due to combining positive psycho-social aspects of group therapy with clinical instruction. In ARC, clinicians provide a variety of reading supports to promote understanding of various levels of print sources dependent on each individual’s reading ability. For this study, retrospective and prospective analysis using the MARSI was conducted to determine individuals’ acquisition and use of metacognitive reading strategies over one year of ARC participation (Lemke, 2015). Results indicated that change in individuals’ reading strategy use may reflect personal factors such as reading aid needs based on type/severity, ARC attendance, and frequency of reading outside of ARC. However, group averages so far show unified growth in all strategy types and overall metacognitive strategy use. By obtaining this information, the effectiveness of ARC and the most beneficial practices were highlighted, which can help develop best practices for aphasia reading groups.