Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

from multisyllabic words. Instruction was given by specialist teachers, each working with
groups of two or three children, with a total of 35 hours of instruction being given in two
teaching sessions of 60 minutes four times each week. The two intervention groups
were compared with a control group of children who received general classroom support
(including training in organization strategies and study skills) but no specific literacy
training over and above that normally provided in the mainstream classroom.
Both the PHAB/DI and WIST programmes were associated with significant
improvements in word identification and word attack skills, compared with the control
group. Children on the PHAB/DI programme also tended to make somewhat greater
progress on measures of sound segmentation and sound blending. However, the results
were characterized by a notable absence of significant age effects; the older students
were found to be equally able to benefit from these intervention programmes as the
younger students. On a wide range of measures, older students were found, on
average, to make gains that were equal to, or greater than, those of younger students.
For example, in word attack (Woodcock Reading Mastery Test – revised) the children in
grades 5–6 on the PHAB/DI programme made an average gain of one standard
deviation (from standard score 61.6 to 76.4) while those in grades 2–3 made an average
gain of two-thirds of a standard deviation (from 68.7 to 78.1). Although in this study the
interventions did not succeed in ‘normalising’ reading (i.e. did not raise the students’
reading skills to standard score 90 or above), the authors conclude that their findings
not only demonstrate that the phonological deficits associated with dyslexia are
“amenable to focused and intensive remedial effort” but also that “there is no evidence
that older disabled readers cannot benefit from intensive deficit-directed remediation of
the core deficits associated with developmental reading disability” (Lovett & Steinbach,
1997, p. 208).
2.10 Conclusions on tertiary intervention
It should be abundantly clear from the studies reviewed in this section that children with
dyslexia or LD can benefit significantly and substantially from intensive tertiary
intervention. Torgesen (2005b), one of the most eminent researchers in the field, sums
it up thus:
“…we now have considerable evidence available concerning the effectiveness of
intensive and explicit reading interventions for children who have struggled in learning
to read. We know, for example, that it is possible to teach almost all children to
accurately apply the alphabetic principle in decoding novel words, even if they have
struggled to acquire this skill during the first 3–4 years of schooling. We also know that
the text reading accuracy and reading comprehension of children with relatively severe
reading disabilities can be accelerated dramatically by carefully administered
interventions that are more intensive than instruction typically provided in special
education settings. We have yet to discover interventions that can ‘normalize’ the
reading fluency of students who have missed out on 2–4 years of reading practice
because of very poor reading skills during the early elementary school years. However,
this problem may ultimately arise from the nature of reading fluency itself and the fact
that fluency continues to accelerate rapidly in ‘average’ readers during the late
elementary, middle, and high school years, rather than being an inherent problem with
the instructional methods currently available.” (Torgesen, 2005b, p. 537)
Intervention for Dyslexia 53