Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

progressing normally (36 boys and 29 girls) formed the control group. Prior to starting
school all the children in the study (N=1,284) had been administered a battery of
cognitive tests of language, memory, intelligence and attention, as well as pre-reading
measures such as letter and word identification, and print awareness. Further tests of
cognition and literacy were given when the children were in 1 st grade. The instructional
approach emphasised phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, building sightword
vocabulary, and developing comprehension strategies.
At both kindergarten and 1 st grade, the at-risk readers were significantly poorer than the
normal readers on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming,
verbal fluency, verbal memory and verbal learning, but not on measures of intelligence,
semantic skills or visual processing. The results showed that 67% of the at-risk readers
scored within the average or above-average range on standardised tests of reading
achievement after only one semester of daily one-to-one tutoring, which supports the
view that in most cases these children’s difficulties had been due to experiential and
instructional deficits, consistent with observations by Clay (1987). However, 33% of the
tutored children scored below the normal range (30 th centile) and 15% well below the
normal range (15 th centile), suggesting that these children’s difficulties had a different or
additional cause. Expressed as percentages of the total population from which they were
drawn, 3% were still below the normal range and 1.5% well below the normal range.
Children who showed the most accelerated growth in reading in response to intervention
approached the level of normal readers and maintained their progress subsequent to the
intervention, whereas children who showed the least acceleration in reading
development continued to perform worse than the other groups subsequent to the
intervention. The tests that significantly distinguished the high reading growth children
from the low reading growth children were those assessing letter and number
identification in kindergarten, and rapid automatised naming, phonological memory and
grammatical judgment in 1 st grade. Cognitive profiles of children who responded most
readily to the intervention were closer to those of normally achieving readers than were
the cognitive profiles of those who were found difficult to remediate.
Overall, the study by Vellutino et al. (1996) not only supports the view that deficits in
phonological skills and verbal memory are associated with risk of reading failure, but
also that children who have poorer response to a one-to-one intervention are more
severely affected in these cognitive domains than are children who make a swift
response to one-to-one intervention. On the basis of our current understanding of
dyslexia (see Section 1.3.1 and Vellutino et al., 2004) it is likely that a considerable
proportion of the poorer responding children were dyslexic.
2.2.3 Torgesen et al. (1999)
Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Rose, Lindamood & Conway (1999) screened children in
13 schools at the beginning of kindergarten on letter name knowledge and phonological
awareness. Children who scored poorly on these tests were deemed to be at risk of
reading difficulties and were selected for intervention, with those scoring below standard
score 75 on vocabulary (Stanford-Binet) being excluded. 180 at-risk children were
randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions:
1. regular classroom support
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