This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
2.5 Informal assessment - Part 2
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Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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Definitions and identification of dyslexia
Causes; identification; numerous activities include simple methods of observation (not formal diagnosis)
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Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
Obviously if you have a doubt about the child,
whether the child is dyslexic or not, you are going to look at the reading and
spelling but you are not going to use any kind of words.
The two types of items which really provide you with invaluable
information on how the phonological decoding route and
the direct access route are working are PSEUDOWORDS and IRREGULAR words.
Let me explain these in turn.
Irregular words are words in which at least one correspondence
between grapheme and phoneme is not regular, is not straightforward.
A few examples of irregular words are 'said',
'yacht', 'knight' with a 'k' at the beginning,
'gift', 'white', 'echo', 'role', 'busy', 'much', 'sure'.
These words, if you think about it,
what path are you going are you going to use to read these words?
Since they are irregular, you cannot use the phonological decoding rule,
because you are going to make mistakes, and I'll come back to these mistakes.
You can only use the lexical stored knowledge.
You need to know that said is pronounced.
'sed' and not 'say-eed', for example.
So, you will have to use the direct access path for these irregular words.
Now, the other type of item, pseudowords:
pseudowords are invented words
like 'labbit', 'porrit', or 'trank'.
Now, if you think about it, these items can only be read
by the phonological decoding route because you don't have any representation of
these words in your brain, of these pseudowords in your brain.
You don't have orthographic representations in the visual area
and phonological representationz in the auditory area.
So for these pseudowords you can only use the phonological decoding path.
Now suppose that a child is reading pseudowords better than irregular words.
What are you going to infer?
You're going to infer that the phonological decoding route
is working quite well because the pseudowords are being read quite
well and the direct access route is not so
good because the regular words leads to mistakes.
The kind of mistakes you are going to observe with irregular
words are 'regularization'.
And for example, instead of, say, 'sed', the child is going to say 'say-eed',
as I said before.
'Busy', the child will say 'buzzy'.
'Much', the child would say 'mush', etcetera.
Now, suppose another child is quite good at irregular words,
at reading irregular words, but is not so good at reading pseudowords.
What can you infer from this?
The opposite.
The fact that the direct access route is working quite well because irregular
word leads to better performance and the phonological decoding route is not so
well established because pseudowords are very difficult to read.
With pseudowords you will often have two types of errors.
One is 'lexicalization' instead of saying,
'labbit', for example, the child is going to say 'rabbit'.
Now this is the witness of an overuse of the direct access path
because the child is going to try and rely on his lexical knowledge to answer.
The other type of error is addition, omission, inversion, etcetera,
which show that the phonological decoding route is
not working well enough, not to induce these mistakes.
Another domain in which you can assess to determine whether
a child might be dyslexic or not as a first level assessment -
and I repeat, this has nothing to do with diagnosis -
is examining text comprehension.
Now I'm going to guide you through several steps inspired by the book from Leslie and
Caldwell.
The first thing to do is to find a suitable text.
You will find in the Resources Section a few formulas which have
been developed to calculate the difficulty of a text.
Dr BevĂŠ Hornsby says that usually a good text is one eliciting 25 errors.
Now what you're going to do with a test, you're going to evaluate
the comprehension in several steps.
The first step is assessing the child's background knowledge of
In relationship with the topic of the text.
You can do this with two tasks.
A task of a conceptual task, and a predictive task.
In the conceptual task, you ask four questions to the child
to do with the background ideas of the of the text.
For example, if it's a text on a mountain,
you can say, well, what sport do you do in the mountain, what can you do, et cetera,
depending on what the text is going to talk about.
And for each answer you can give a mark between zero and
three depending on the quality of the answer.
Now in the second task, the predictive task, you say to the child,
since the title of the passage is blah blah and it speaks about blah blah and
you take again ... (what) the child has said in the conceptual task,
what do you think the text is going to be about?
So you ask, really, the child to make a prediction about the content of the text.
Now if you look at both the predictive task and
the conceptual task, you can sort of derive the percentage
(of ... the ... amount) of knowledge regarding the text.
In Leslie and Caldwell's studies,
children who scored at least 55% on this
task obtained comprehension result which were at least 75%.
So, you can see how the background knowledge of a text is paramount for
the understanding, the comprehension of that text.
That was the first step, evaluating prior knowledge on the text.
The second step is presenting the text.
So you ask the child to read the text aloud.
I suggest that you have two copies of the text,
one for the child and one for you so that you can write down the errors.
And I also advise, if possible, that you record a child so
that you can hear again ... tape to see the errors, the hesitations.
And it also allows you to observe the child more closely when she's reading.
Then you are going to assess on the comprehension of the text.
Again, you can do it two ways, with two tasks.
A recall task, you simply ask the child to say what was in the text as if
she was explaining the text to someone who has not read it, the story.
And you should look (for) particular points like,
is the sequence respected, does the recall bring back the central idea,
and then the details which support it.
Does the recall keep the usual order, the basic structure,
(what are) the background, characters, issues, events, and outcome?
Is the recall sequential?
(I already said it.)
Is the recall precise?
Does the child omit important things?
So that was true recall.
Now you can assess comprehension:
obviously also through questions you are going to ask
two types of question:
explicit for which the answer is in the text and implicit questions
where the child has to infer information which is not in the text per se.
The fourth thing you're going to do is to assess the strategy used for
completing the information.
We know that dyslexic learners use less effective
strategies for finding information in a text compared to non-dyslexics, so
it is not always possible to know whether lack of answer, or
an incorrect answer is due to a problem of comprehension of the text, or memory.
And so what you do in the next step is you present the text again to the child and
you ask her for the mistakes, the questions which
were not correctly answered, to find the information in the text,
and you look carefully at the strategy she's using to do that.
The final step is to analyze the mistakes that
the child has done when reading the text.
The mistake obviously provides important indicators of
the strategy the child is using.
Dr BevĂŠ Hornsby suggests classifying the errors into two categories,
the positive errors and the negative errors.
Examples of positive errors are omission insertion,
change of sequence, and
inattention to punctuation, provided that the meaning is not altered.
Another example is repetition of a word or
part of a word, which at least signals an attempt to get the meaning.
Another example is self correction.
Now if you move to the negative errors, these are again omissions,
insertion, addition, etcetera,
change of sequence and (in)attention to punctuation,
which alter the meaning ... by which the meaning is changed.
Also a refusal to read a word, which signals no attempt to decode.
Another example is contextual retrieval.
Now, the next thing you could do is to use the results of the comprehension test.
What can you do exactly with those results?
Well it is vital to use what you have learned from this examination to stimulate
the positive strategy, so to speak, the positive errors which are being underused.
This could be, for example, link more to prior knowledge.
This is something dyslexic learners have difficulties to do.
Pay more attention to the punctuation.
Improve the coding strategies and create self-checking and self-correction.
However, be very careful to guide the child away from strateg(ies)
which are being overexploited, and which are negative,
usually relying too much on the context to guess a word.
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