Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

difficulties in acquiring phonics are likely to develop reading difficulties, and hence a test
of phonological decoding (e.g. a non-word or pseudoword decoding test) should become
a key part of the screening (Torgesen, 2002). However, it is not always possible to
differentiate at school entry between pupils who have dyslexia and pupils who are at risk
for reading problems for other reasons, because many children from poor home
backgrounds will have poor phonological awareness, and experience difficulties in
learning letter/sound correspondences as well as in learning to decode print using
phonic decoding strategies. But in cases where the child has good vocabulary knowledge
and comes from a home background where there have been ample opportunities to
become familiar with books, then difficulties in phonological awareness and in learning
letter/sound correspondences become much more reliable indicators of dyslexia. And
where a close relative also had early reading problems this further strengthens the case
for considering the child to have dyslexia (see Snowling, Gallagher & Frith, 2003).
Torgesen (2002) also claims that the number of false negatives can be reduced ‘to
virtually zero’ if screening is conducted regularly in 1 st , 2 nd and 3 rd grade.
Torgesen, Foorman and Wagner (2007) have summed up this process thus:
“… we currently understand how to identify students at risk for reading failure with a
relatively high degree of accuracy as early as preschool or kindergarten. Reliable tests of
phonemic awareness, letter/sound knowledge, or phonemic decoding will show these
students to be substantially behind their peers, unless they have already received
powerful instructional interventions. … In first grade, reliable tests of phonemic
awareness, phonemic decoding, and text reading accuracy and fluency will also identify
[dyslexic] students accurately. In later grades, dyslexic students who have not received
powerful interventions may still remain relatively impaired in phonemic awareness, and
will always perform poorly on tests of phonemic decoding, text reading fluency, and
spelling.” (Torgesen, Foorman and Wagner, 2007, p.4)
4.1.3 Response to intervention
Among the findings of the successful intervention study reported by Vellutino et al.
(1996) (see Section 2.2.2) was the discovery that children who showed the most
accelerated growth in reading as a direct result of intervention approached the level of
normal readers and maintained their progress subsequent to the intervention, whereas
children who showed the least acceleration in reading development continued to
perform worse than the other groups subsequent to the intervention. Hence it is
possible to predict outcome (to some degree) by the children’s response to intervention
(RTI). Accordingly, Fuchs and Fuchs (1998) called for a rethink of the way in which
learning disabilities are identified, based not on the traditional notion of discrepancy
between attainment and IQ but, instead, on RTI. In this approach, students are not
classified as having learning disabilities unless and until it has been demonstrated
empirically that they are not benefiting from the general education curriculum. This
technique is similar to that used in developmental medicine, whereby a child’s growth
over time is compared to that of a same age group. A child that shows a large
discrepancy between his or her height (or weight) and that of a normative sample may
be considered a candidate for medical intervention (e.g. growth hormonal therapy). In
education, a child that has a discrepancy between the current level of academic
performance and that of same-age peers in the same classroom might be considered a
candidate for intervention.
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