The effectiveness of interpersonal psychotherapy on reducing anxiety and improving English reading skills in dyslexic students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of interpersonal psychotherapy on reducing anxiety and improving English reading skills of dyslexic students. The research method is a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest with a control group. The population consisted of all dyslexic students in Karaj city in the academic year 2016-2017 of whom 31 participants were selected by purposive, availability sampling and randomly assigned into an experimental (15) and a control group (16). The anxiety questionnaire was used for the students as a pretest as well as the Topnotch Placement Test. The participants were then subjected to interpersonal psychotherapy for 8 sessions of 60 minutes. The control group did not receive any intervention. After performing the treatment, the results were compared with covariance analysis and an independent samples t-test. The findings showed a significant reduction in students' anxiety in the experimental group compared to the control group (p < .001). Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference between the performance of experimental over the control group in the reading comprehension. Therefore, interpersonal psychotherapy can be used for dyslexic students and can be used as a psychological intervention along with other interventions.