“PARLER”: A Program to Prevent Learning Difficulties

This research is designed to assess how “PARLER”, a program implemented from kindergarten through to the end of grade 2 to promote language development and prevent academic failure in disadvantaged areas, impacts pupils’ achievements. The results show that the pupils who benefited from the PARLER program (N = 107) have learnt more by the end of grade 2 in all the fields tested when compared with the pupils in the control group (N = 106). PARLER has a very strong effect on oral language and reading, in particular on reading comprehension; non-verbal logic is also positively affected by the PARLER program, which indicates that the scope of this scheme is not limited solely to progress in oral and written language, which was its main area of focus.