Sofia Giazitzidou

I have been contributing to E-READ by undertaking an active role informally in a Greek research group. In particular, in collaboration with my supervisor Mrs. Susana Padeliadu and Mrs. Faye Antoniou, we have prepared two tablet applications, which aim at enhancing reading fluency of students who face learning difficulties. More specifically, we would like to investigate how e-reading could enhance and support reading rate and decoding skills of students with learning disabilities through exploitation of new technology tools and advantages. Thus, one important feature of the strategies used in the applications is that they can be adjusted to students’ cognitive skills in order to support them efficiently and appropriately. For example, the model “Reading-while-listening”, a strategy which is included in these applications, provides students with the possibility not only to listen to the model reading of the text when they read it, but it also utilizes a specific tool, which marks the words that are decoded in order to support the word attack skills and concentrate students’ attention on specific points of the text. In this context, we have already completed the design and construction of the aforementioned applications and we intend to investigate the implementation of these digital reading programs in practice experimentally.

Furthermore, another way through which I participate in the E-READ program is by being a member in a meta-analysis subgroup, where, in collaboration with Susana Padeliadu, Faye Antoniou, Lalo Salmeron, Rakefet Ackerman, Gal Ben-Yehudah, Hildegunn Stole and Tomislav Jakopec, we conduct a meta-analysis on studies of digital reading. In particular, we try to investigate the impact of e-reading in comparison to print reading through exploring and evaluating several factors. Hence, my role in the existing meta-analysis project is to focus on article processing. Specifically, I contribute to article encoding by coding information for defined factors, suggesting new factors where needed and pilot assessing the coding implementation. Consequently, I contribute to the E-READ program through the digital applications that we have constructed in collaboration with Mrs. Susana Padeliadu and Mrs. Faye Antoniou and also through the meta-analysis project.