Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

5.1 Introduction
5.1.1 Scope
5 Reading Recovery
The chief purpose of this chapter is to address the question: ‘What evidence is there
that Reading Recovery is, or is likely to be, an appropriate method of intervention for
children with dyslexia?’ More specifically, the remit of the review calls for a summary of
published evidence on Reading Recovery delivered as part of Every Child a Reader
(ECaR), and of whatever published evidence there may be on the impact of Reading
Recovery on children with dyslexia. Since literature searches failed to discover any
studies of Reading Recovery which had been conducted with children identified as
having dyslexia, the question of the effectiveness of Reading Recovery for children with
dyslexia therefore has to be addressed by other means (see Section 5.6). The principal
emphasis in the later parts of this chapter, therefore, is on reviewing evidence of the
immediate and longer-term impact of Reading Recovery in England. That review covers
both the Reading Recovery-based initiative Every Child a Reader (ECaR), which began in
2005 and is still being rolled out to all Reading Recovery providers here, and Reading
Recovery as it was before ECaR and in some places still is. However, in both guises
Reading Recovery here may be seen as a development of Reading Recovery
internationally, and hence it first necessary to discuss the rationale and pedagogy of
Reading Recovery, and to review rigorous evaluations.
5.1.2 What is Reading Recovery?
Reading Recovery is an early intervention programme for children who have made a
poor start in learning to read and who are therefore at risk of literacy difficulties. The
programme was first developed by the late Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970s, and
has been implemented in that country for over 30 years. Anand and Bennie (2005)
reported that, in 2003, 67% of all state primary schools in New Zealand were using
Reading Recovery. The programme has also been widely adopted in several other
countries, most notably Australia – where it was introduced in 1984 and is most
extensively used in Victoria and New South Wales – and the United States, where it was
introduced in the same year. Lyons & Beaver (1995) reported that by 1994 a total of 47
US States had implemented the programme to some degree. Reading Recovery has
been less extensively adopted in the UK and Ireland.
The Reading Recovery programme comprises 12–20 weeks of intensive, one-to-one,
daily tuition, normally targeted at the 20% of children who are the lowest in literacy
attainment, delivered by teachers who have been trained to deliver the programme.
Formerly implemented after one year of schooling (i.e. in Year 2), in Britain it is now
implemented in Year 1. The identification of the at-risk children is usually by teacher
selection (e.g. the poorest 20% of readers in the class) together with use of the
Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (2 nd edition) (Clay, 2002; 1 st edition
was Clay, 1993a). More recently, the British Ability Scales (2 nd edition) Word Reading
Test (Elliott et al., 1996) is also used. The Observation Survey, which is nonstandardised,
comprises criterion assessment of text reading, letter identification, writing
to dictation, knowledge of concepts about print, sight words and writing vocabulary. The
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