Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

eading accuracy, 8.3 for reading comprehension, and 3.3 for spelling (Vernon). The
reading ability of participants from Year 2–6 in these studies was very poor before
intervention and most clearly made substantial progress as a result of intervention.
Lore (2001) reported on the use of Phono-Graphix at Moon Hall School in Surrey, an
independent specialist school for children with dyslexia. The participants were pupils in
Years 5 and 6, all of whom were severely dyslexic and were at least three years behind
chronological age levels in reading ability. After 6 months using Phono-Graphix, the
average reading improvement for one cohort of 11 pupils was 24.5 months (range 13 –
37 months), with a ratio gain of 4.1. After intervention most of these dyslexic pupils
were performing within, or approaching, the normal range in reading ability, and with
further input would be expected to improve further. Lore reports similar progress with
subsequent cohorts taught using Phono-Graphix in that school, and Brooks (2007) also
reports on a study using Phono-Graphix with 12 dyslexic children in Year 4 in the same
school. After 6 months’ intervention, the children were found to have made remarkable
progress, with a ratio gain of 4.5 (Macmillan Graded Word Reading test).
3.3.6 Phonology with Reading
Bowyer-Crane et al. (2008) compared a ‘phonology with reading’ intervention approach
(P + R) with an oral language approach (OL) for a sample of children (mean age 4 years
9 months) who were at risk of literacy difficulties because of their poor oral language at
school entry, i.e. before formal reading instruction had commenced. Initial screening of
960 children in 23 schools was carried out using tests of expressive language and
nonword repetition, with the lowest scoring children being classified as at risk (N=152)
and randomly assigned to either the P + R or the OL (comparison) condition. Both
groups received 20 weeks of daily intervention from trained teaching assistants, who
alternated daily between 30 minutes of individual tuition and 20 minutes of small group
work (approximately 42 hours of total intervention). The P + R group focused on lettersound
knowledge, phonological awareness and text reading skills. The OL group focused
on vocabulary, comprehension, inference generation and narrative skills. Although this
study did not attempt to classify any of these at-risk children as being dyslexic, it is
highly likely that a significant proportion of them were, given the evidence on the
relationship between early language skills and later dyslexia (Snowling, 2008; Snowling
& Hayiou-Thomas, 2006).
At the end of the intervention, the P + R group displayed significant advantages over
the OL group in measures of literacy (effect sizes 0.32–0.45) and strong advantages in
phonological skills (0.7 SD at post-test). Since the experimental design involved a
treated control group, lower effect sizes were to be expected than if the control had
remained untreated. The OL group showed advantages over the P + R group on
measures of vocabulary (1 SD at post-test) and grammatical skills. A follow-up five
months later indicated that these gains had mostly been maintained. A standard score of
below 85 for reading was used to identify children who still remained at risk after the
intervention; on this criterion 50% of the P + R group and 68% of the OL group were
still at risk. Moreover, 7% of the children in the P + R group had above average reading
scores (above SS 115) while none of the OL children fell in this range. This study does
not provide a cognitive analysis of the children who were ‘normalised’ compared with
those still at risk at the end of the study, and hence it remains a possibility that the
dyslexic children within this sample all remained below 85 SS in reading. Nevertheless,
this study does demonstrate that trained teaching assistants are able to deliver
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