Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

BAS Word Reading Test (Early Years version) is standardised for the age-range 2:6–
7:11.
In each daily session lasting 30 minutes, the Reading Recovery teacher engages the
child in a number of set activities around texts selected according to the child’s reading
level. These activities include re-reading one or more previously encountered texts,
identifying letters and words, writing a story, hearing and writing sounds in words,
reassembling a story, and reading a new text. When children have reached the point
that they can read texts which the average child in their class can read, and can write
several sentences, they are judged to have ‘achieved accelerated progress’ (as recent
Reading Recovery parlance has it) and are ‘successfully discontinued’ from the
programme (Clay, 1993b). Children who do not achieve this target are usually referred
for special education.
5.1.3 Rationale and pegagogy
Reading Recovery may be seen as a pedagogical sibling to the ‘whole-language’ theory
of reading, which maintains that reading skills arise naturally out of frequent encounters
with interesting and absorbing reading materials (Goodman, 1986; Smith, 1978).
According to this theory, the capacity of readers to rely on syntactic and semantic cues
in reading is such that only minimal graphophonic cues are necessary, because words
can usually be predicted using syntactic and semantic information (Goodman, 1986).
Hence, it is argued that children do not need to be taught explicitly about the alphabetic
code or the relationships between letters and sounds provided they are immersed in a
print-rich environment in which the emphasis is on context and meaning (Smith & Elley,
1994). Arguably, this approach makes the logical error of assuming that cognitive
processes adopted by older, skilled readers constitute a satisfactory basis for teaching
beginning readers. Although Clay did not use the term ‘whole-language’ to describe her
approach, and certainly did not imply that children do not need to be taught how to
read, the similarities between ‘whole-language’ theory and her philosophy of Reading
Recovery are apparent: “In efficient rapid word perception, the reader relies mostly on
the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words.
Awareness of the sentence context (and often the general context of the text as a
whole) and a glance at the word enables the reader to respond instantly” (Clay, 1991, p.
8). 10 Clay (1979) described how “…the High Progress Reader even at six years...reads
with attention focused on the meaning. What he thinks the text will say is checked by
looking for letter-sound associations” (p. 2). She reiterated these beliefs in 1993: “The
child checks language predictions by looking at some letters ... can hear the sounds in a
word he speaks (i.e., predicts) and checks whether the expected letters are there” (Clay,
1993b, p. 41). Accordingly, in Reading Recovery lessons, children read real story books
aloud to the teacher and, while reading, are encouraged to use context as the principal
method of identifying words, to monitor for meaningfulness and make corrections only
when necessary to make sense, and to use letter-sound clues sparingly in order to
confirm context-based predictions (Clay, 1991; 1993b).
10 For a detailed review of Clay’s philosophy see Groff (2004).
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