Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

“The importance of early identification, assessment and provision for any child who may
have special educational needs cannot be over-emphasised. The earlier action is taken,
the more responsive the child is likely to be, and the more readily can intervention be
made without undue disruption to the organisation of the school. Assessment should not
be regarded as a single event but rather as a continuous process.”
(DFES, 2001, Paragraph 5:11)
The SEN Code of Practice also advocates the use of standardised screening or
assessment tools, as well as a range of other sources of information, in order to
ascertain the extent and nature of a child’s special educational needs (DFES, 2001,
Paragraph 5:13).
Dyslexia screening tools use a range of subtests of different cognitive abilities that
underpin literacy development and from which information is combined to yield a
conclusion that is of acceptable reliability and accuracy, although teachers need to be
mindful of the limitations of such tests. The alternative technique of screening to identify
children who are behind in reading development and using that as a basis for
determining which pupils should receive intervention is likely to be far less satisfactory if,
in fact, the children have dyslexia. While it is accepted that children who are falling
behind in reading should be noticed by teachers, and that appropriate action taken in
such cases, nevertheless many dyslexic children slip through the net. Although the
correlation between early reading ability and later reading ability is relatively high
(usually in the region 0.6–0.7), poor early reading ability per se is not by itself
necessarily a very good predictor of later literacy difficulties in individual cases (Fletcher
et al., 2002b; Francis, 1992; Lerkkanen, Rasku-Puttonen, Aunola & Nurmi, 2004; Paris,
2005; Singleton, Thomas & Horne, 2000). There are several reasons for this. First,
young children exhibit individual fluctuations in reading performance. Second, reading
development is not a smooth, continuous process: children follow different paths or
trajectories in learning to read. Trajectories of reading development are determined by
many factors, including cognitive strengths and weaknesses, vocabulary knowledge,
teaching approaches and reading materials employed, differential difficulty of subskills
that have to be mastered (letter identification, whole-word recognition, phonics, etc.),
and subskill interdependency (e.g. phoneme identification precedes blending and
segmenting ability) (Paris, 2005). Children with reading difficulties tend to show
particularly heterogenous trajectories of development (Lipka, Lesaux & Siegel, 2006).
Consequently, it is possible for a child to have dyslexia but nevertheless to make
sufficient early progress in word recognition to escape the teacher’s notice, and even to
perform within age-expectations on a standardised test of word reading. The use of
investigative measures which are more sensitive to dyslexia, such as formal or informal
tests of phonic decoding skills, verbal memory and phonological awareness – which are
key features of dyslexia screening and assessment batteries – can avoid such children
slipping through the net.
94 Intervention for Dyslexia