Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

as degree of impairment, overall amount of instruction and qualifications and experience
of instructors, analysis of the effects of group size is problematic. Nevertheless,
inspection of the results of the various studies in Table 4 does not suggest that, on the
whole, literacy gains were any better in studies where tuition was individual than in
those in which groups of pupils were taught together. Indeed, the studies by Torgesen
et al. (2003), Wise et al. (1999) and Rashotte et al. (2001), which all employed groups
of four pupils, all obtained good results.
The study by Rashotte et al. (2001) is particularly noteworthy in that not only was
instruction delivered in small groups of four pupils rather than 1:1, it was also over a
relatively short period of 8 weeks, and by instructors who were trained (6-day training
programme) but who were not specialists in remedial education (only one of the four
instructors was a qualified teacher). Comparable results in favour of using instructors
who are not necessarily teachers were obtained in the successful secondary intervention
study by Vadasy et al. (2002) reported above. In this case, intervention was provided by
parents and other adults from within the community who had been trained to deliver the
programmes.
Unsurprisingly, intervention programmes delivered to small groups of children by
instructors who are not necessarily teachers is a great deal more cost-effective than
programmes requiring 1:1 tuition delivered over much longer periods by specialist
teachers whose training is lengthy and expensive. For example, supposing an instructor
taught four groups of three children each day, and was paid £15 per hour plus an
allowance of two additional paid hours per day for planning and preparation, the overall
cost per child for the 35 hours of instruction would be £275. However, it should be
noted that the students in the study by Rashotte et al. (2001) were not, in general,
severely disabled in reading: at the outset of the study the average reading accuracy
was standard score 89.
2.9.4 Age
There is an old adage within the special educational needs sector that ‘earlier is better’.
For example, the SEN Code of Practice states that identification of special educational
needs should be made as early as possible because earlier intervention is likely to be
more effective than later intervention (DfES, 2001, Paragraph 5:11). The British Dyslexia
Association also calls for identification of dyslexia to be made as early as possible (BDA,
2007). It is pertinent, therefore, to consider the published evidence on whether age
makes a significant difference to the impact of intervention.
Lovett & Steinbach (1997) studied 122 disabled readers from grades 2 to 6 (ages 7–12
years) who were of average intelligence but below the 20 th centile on several measures
of reading proficiency, including word identification and word attack. The children were
given instruction using one of two approaches: (a) the Phonological Analysis and
Blending Direction Instruction programme (PHAB/DI), which focused on letter-sound
and letter cluster-sound correspondences, or (b) the Word Identification Strategy
Training programme (WIST), which focused on teaching word identification strategies in
the context of key words that represent 120 high-frequency English spelling patterns.
The former corresponds most closely to the core features of conventional specialist
dyslexia teaching, but the latter also figures in many specialist dyslexia teaching
approaches (see Section 1.3.3). The four strategies in the WIST programme were: (i)
word identification by analogy, (ii) seeking the part of the word that you know, (iii)
attempting variable vowel pronunciations, and (iv) segmenting prefixes and suffixes
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