Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

MacKay (2006) studied the use of Toe by Toe in 32 Scottish primary schools with 91
Year 7 pupils who were poor readers. Over a 6-month intervention period the ratio gain
for reading was 2.3 (NARA). Brooks (2007) also reports on an unpublished study using
Toe by Toe with 21 primary age children with literacy difficulties (age not stated). Over
an 18-month intervention period a ratio gain of 2.7 was obtained for reading.
3.3.12 Summary
This section has shown that the featured phonologically based interventions on average
produced good results: on the whole, the children involved made useful gains in reading
(both accuracy and comprehension) and in spelling. Two further points are worth
noting: (1) All the programmes except Toe by Toe embed the phonics teaching within a
broad and rich literacy curriculum (for details, see Brooks, 2007); (2) Of the three
studies with dyslexic children, the two using Phono-Graphix produced large ratio gains.
These findings are consistent with those from more rigorous studies conducted
elsewhere in the world and analysed in Chapter 2.
For comparisons between phonologically based programmes and Reading Recovery
(including Every Child a Reader) see Section 5.4.3.
64 Intervention for Dyslexia