Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

probably require some 1:1 teaching in addition, as demonstrated in a recent study
reported by Whiteley, Smith & Connors (2007)
Whiteley et al. (2007) reported on a study of children at risk for dyslexia who attended
schools in the north west of England. The children were selected by screening a total of
432 children using the Dyslexia Early Screening Test (DEST) (for details see Section
4.3.3). 90 children (21% of the sample) were found to be at risk and formed the
intervention group (which was reduced by participant attrition to 67 children by the end
of the study). A control group of children was selected: these were not at risk and were
matched for intelligence with the intervention group (control group N=90 initially,
reduced to 68 finally). In Year 1 the children in the intervention group received a 20minute
daily lesson delivered over 15 weeks by trained researchers to groups of up to
six children, using the programme ‘Launch into Reading Success’ (LIRS) (Ottley &
Bennett, 1997). LIRS is a systematic phonological training scheme that focuses on the
development of increasingly fine-grained analytical skills, starting with whole words and
going down to the phoneme level. The total amount of intervention was 25 hours. After
this intervention, 40 of the 67 at-risk children had made ‘noticeable progress’ and the
remainder no progress or had declined further. The children who had not benefited from
the intervention but remained at risk then received a further 15-week intervention
delivered on an individual basis.
At the end of Year 2 all children were re-screened using the Dyslexia Screening Test
(DST); 44 of the original at-risk group were classified as not at risk (66%), and four of
the control group (6%) were identified as being at risk. The final results showed that 44
(66%) of the at-risk children were able to benefit from the intervention, and although 27
of these achieved this progress in 15 weeks of small group intervention, 16 only
progressed after an extended period of 1:1 tuition. This total group of children who
benefited from the intervention achieved mean standard scores of 104 for reading and
103 for spelling at the end of the study and could be said to have had their literacy skills
‘normalised’. The at-risk children who had not responded to the interventions (N=23;
34%) had mean standard scores of 85 for reading and 87 for spelling at the end of the
study. Poor letter knowledge and poor expressive vocabulary were found to be the most
powerful predictors of poor response to intervention. These authors suggest that
children who are at risk of dyslexia or reading difficulties and who have poor vocabulary
skills require intensive intervention that addresses vocabulary as well as decoding, word
recognition and spelling.
Intervention for Dyslexia 75