01 NRDC Dyslexia 1-88 update - Texthelp

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Research Report
severely dyslexic male participant in his mid-20s was supplemented when three more dyslexic
participants from the first study volunteered for the intervention.
The intervention regime, which was unsupervised, was followed for periods of four or five
months. It had two parts. For the first part, volunteers were advised to spend two hours a day
in novel, direct, small-scale hand-eye coordination tasks such as drawing, painting, or modelbuilding.
For the second part, volunteers were ask to read by placing over their chosen text a
transparent (or translucent, or opaque) sheet on which there was a fixation mark and, to the
right of it, a window large enough for a long word to be visible.
The investigators concluded that, when people with severe dyslexia are taught to read by a
regimen of practice that does not challenge their existing visual strategies, their acquired
ability to read is accompanied by a shift of visual strategy to that of the ordinary reader, which
suggests that visual strategies can be learned and that the distribution of lateral masking
found in the ordinary reader is what makes ordinary reading possible.
The first volunteer was reported to have made seven years’ reading progress in the space of
four months. There were various outcomes for the other three volunteers. After they had
stopped practising, however, three of the four volunteers quickly regressed in their ability to
read.
It is unclear how the participants acquired the word-recognition skills implicit in these claims.
However, the investigators subsequently replicated their intervention in two studies of children
(Geiger & Lettvin, 1997), from which comparably rapid improvement was reported.
Simultaneous multi-sensory instructional procedure (Kitz & Nash, 1992)
This study sought to determine whether the intervention programme would improve poor
readers’ word-level decoding, comprehension, spelling, reading rate and which measures are
the best predictors of reading comprehension among adult poor readers. The programme
consisted of seven weeks of formal reading and spelling instruction, using a simultaneous
multi-sensory instructional procedure paradigm teaching sound-symbol associations and
synthetic phonics with morphological analyses of prefixes, suffixes and word roots.
The participants were 63 college students attending a summer programme. Their mean age was
20 years and they had previously been identified by various criteria as learning-disabled.
There were significant differences between pre- and post-test scores on spelling, reading rate,
reading comprehension and phoneme deletion.
The investigators drew attention to the fact that this intervention was generally provided in large
group settings of seven to 18 students, contrasting it with a reading-remediation literature
consisting mainly of case studies or small-sample studies. However, they noted that the
contribution of the multisensory component of the strategy is insufficiently understood.
Spelling improvement for college students who are dyslexic (Guyer et al., 1993)
The purpose of this study was to determine if college students with dyslexia would make more
progress when taught with an ‘alphabetic-synthetic and multisensory phonetic’ method, or an
analytic ‘nonphonetic’ approach which taught repeated copying and visual memory, or with no
intervention at all. The methods appear to differ in that the synthetic method taught syllable
division according to morphological criteria whereas the analytic method did not. The intervention