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
2.7 Identification – Later years 1
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
Definitions and identification of dyslexia
Causes; identification; numerous activities include simple methods of observation (not formal diagnosis)
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
So now we're going to talk about identification of dyslexia in the later
years.
So lots of what you heard from Vincent about
identification in the early years is still going to be very relevant.
Some of the signs he was talking about, and some of the ways of assessing
he mentioned, may well, you may try these with children and see issues arising.
But sometimes, you may not see these very overt signs in older children,
but you still have a sense that something's not right.
This child is struggling, and but you're not quite sure what's going on.
And definitely, it can be harder to work out what's going on with older children.
Something I often use is the flowchart that you are going to see now.
So as you can see on this flowchart, if we start at the top,
a child may either be clearly identified with having decoding
problems in the first couple of years of schooling, or not.
If they're not identified with a problem, they'll go into the 'no' box on the right
and then these children will go on to be accurate decoders;
so there's no overt issue with these children at this stage.
However, the children that we're particularly interested in
in this course, they have potentially been identified with decoding problems.
And then, there's a continuum of ... how these children may look in their
later years, depending on what's happened with that initial decoding problem.
So as you can see in the chart, some children, may, if they're fortunate,
receive intensive help, almost as soon as that decoding problem is detected.
And so what we're starting to understand ... if children get early,
intensive, systematic phonics help, is that for
many children, this will result in accurate decoding
after several iterations of this intervention.
So the current statistic for the number of children who will benefit
from this kind of approach is around 70% of poor readers.
But that does mean that then we have a 30 percentage who, despite
receiving this intensive systematic help, are still struggling to decode.
And so in the later years,
you'll still see that very overt struggle with decoding.
So in many ways, these children are going to be one of the easiest groups to
identify, because that primary problem is still present.
You're also going to have a group of children who don't receive
early intervention.
So these children will also remain poor decoders, although,
in their case, because they haven't received the help it may actually be
that they may be more amenable to it later.
So their struggles with decoding in later years
are more just an artifact of not having had the early help,
as opposed to the group who have had intensive help, and
they're still not responding.
So, poor decoding can be the result of two different issues here:
either a lack of response to an intense intervention, or
actually having not received an intervention.
And so, really often, the only way to distinguish between these two
groupings in later years is to either do some probing around, and
find out the child's history of health, or else trial and intervention.
Try some of the best practice that we are going to be talking
about in the later weeks
and look at the child's response to this intervention.
This will then help (you) to know if this is the right way to proceed, or
whether another approach is going to be needed, but
as we've also said, reading is not just about decoding.
There's going to be some other steps that these children
need to become successful readers.
So where we have children who are potentially accurate decoders,
they now need to develop FLUENCY.
That's one of the next developmental tasks for them.
There may be something partly constitutional about your ability to
acquire fluency, but also, it's often built up in typical development,
just as a result of continued exposure to text and
practice, practice, practice at reading.
And so here again, we're going to see the different children depending on the degree
of struggle they've had with reading, and what kind of help they've received.
Their motivation to read, read, read is clearly going to be different.
Some children who potentially have not received help,
where decoding is effortful, why would they really want to spend hours and
hours doing this thing that they're struggling with?
So then it becomes slightly a vicious cycle, because then ... ... they're
not getting the practice and so the fluency is remaining effortful for them,
whereas in other cases,
we do see that children are slightly more able to achieve fluency.
So fluency is something that's quite, quite easy to observe.
Typically, children, if they're fluent with reading out loud,
you'll see a similar pattern in their silent reading and vice versa.
So just asking a child to read out loud, seeing how many words they're
reading in a minute, will actually give you a good sense of how fluent they are.
There also are checklists that give you approximate norms for
how fluent children are expected to be
and we'll have these posted on our website.
But also, if you don't have access to that, or you want to, or you feel that
actually the children that you work with may be a slightly special population
you can actually just measure the reading speed of the children,
all the children in your classroom, and
then you can get a sense of where children lie in the continuum.
So that's fluency.
But then obviously the ultimate aim of reading is comprehension.
And again, children who potentially
struggled at the earliest stages of reading, are going to show multiple
patterns of comprehension by the time they've been reading for a few years.
So for some children, it may be that their
decoding is effortful, still, they are not that fluent.
So this is going to detract the amount of mental energy they have
in terms of reading comprehension
and so thinking about the bigger picture,
the higher meaning of what they're reading.
And so this isn't actually a comprehension issue per se.
In terms of actually, they understand the content of the text.
But they, once the effort of the other levels of the reading
are accomplished, there's just not enough space to do the other part,
which is the thinking about the bigger picture.
So one way to determine whether a child is struggling with comprehension
as a capacity problem, is actually quite straightforward.
You can ask the child to read a paragraph of text or
maybe a few paragraphs, depending on their ability.
And then also some comprehension questions about that text.
Some that are direct facts that they can find in those paragraphs,
and maybe a question or two that might take a bit of inference or
prediction about what might happen next.
And if they struggle with any of those, then if you then read aloud the same
text and then re-ask those questions.
If the student can clearly easily comprehend when their not actually having
to do the physical act of the reading
then it's probably more likely that it's that they're not
having reading comprehensions as a matter of oral language difficulty,
but it is more of a capacity problem, there being the effort of the decoding and
the fluency is not leaving much mental energy left for the deeper comprehension.
A key thing here is to then help the child break down the text into more
manageable chunks, so that there not guessing beyond their capacity,
so there taking a small chunk not getting beyond the point where
there comprehension is overloaded, and so it's training them
to take quite a metacognitive approach to comprehension,
monitoring their own level of understanding, and
making sure that they don't go too beyond their overload point.
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