Primary School wont diagnose dyslexia

[bethalexander]

My 9yo DD is really struggling with her spelling and is bottom of her class. We think she has dyslexia but her primary won't test her. Getting her tested privately costs a fortune. Surely the primary have a duty to test her?

Not sure I dare! can make head or tail of this whole thread but I take APLaceOnTheCouch's comment regarding the damaging impact of orthodoxies. My youngest child is severely dyslexic, only picked up at 8 because of non existent spelling despite relatively good reading for age. Against her peers there seemed little problem but in the contact of her siblings it was obvious she was under performing. When she was eventually assessed (and has since been reassessed for public exams) it was found that she has an astonishing memory (hence the apparent reading ability level) but NO phonic ear at all. I am/was a fan of phonics as taught to my other children, until I had DD. You can try phonics until the cows come home but she will never, ever 'hear' the parts of the whole. Inconsistency is her watchword. She is also dyspraxic, so the effort of trying to spell gets in the way of production. Now that she uses a computer/voice aided technology she is working at somewhere near her true ability. I am always amazed at the responses she encounters to her form of dyslexia. She has had some wonderful teaching, and has made great progress, but she will never spell adequately. However, she is aiming for Oxbridge and if she is anything like her brother (and she is) she will make it. But phonics will for ever remain a mystery.

Incidentally, and for the avoidance of doubt, DD has been lucky enough to benefit from access to a superb set of teachers and the quality of any teaching she has received has b=never been in doubt. The only wrinkle came when a prolonged focus on phonics and the exclusion of other approaches meant that it took longer than it need have for the staff to marry up the gap between her obvious abilities with her non existent writing and spelling skills. For example, she learned her spellings according to phonic and progressive methods, and was asked on test day to include the word in sentences. A fantastic memory meant she usually got the word correct but the rest of the sentence wrong. When they 'tricked' her (her words, aged 7) by testing let's say 'like' when she had been asked to learn 'bike', she would fail, because she couldn't hear the correlation between the words. At all.

www.blearning.biz

" An important piece of information arising from these neurobiological studies is that with intense specific intervention targeted at phonological skills, dyslexic readers are able to activate the same pathways that good readers do. Although it has a neurobiological root, dyslexia is not a neurologic disease. Word reading difficulties represent variations in development that can be corrected with targeted intervention (Simos et al., 2002). Goswami (2004) supports this view by stating that studies suggest dyslexia is characterized by an immature language system rather than a deviant one."

"Brain neuroimaging studies related to what constitutes effective intervention has implicated intense and systematic instruction in phonological skills. Phonological training includes phonics instruction, which has been well established as a necessary part of reading instruction. But phonological training is more than phonics teaching, it includes an awareness of the sounds within words and practice in manipulating those sounds, both in oral and written form. This awareness is often assumed by teachers rather than viewed as something that must be taught to many
students. This is not necessarily new information for all teachers, but these studies provide scientific proof for this type of intervention. We now know why these strategies work; they help to activate the neural pathways necessary for skilled reading, which are not necessarily used or activated by
dyslexic students. The fact that these pathways can be activated in dyslexic brains, is the key."

Interestingly, the intense instruction Simos was referring to was not actually synthetic phonics or analytic phonics, but phono-graphix, a system which considered itself to be a third paradigm.

BCBG, do you mind me asking how she got to 7 before it was spotted that she couldn't spell like, if she'd learnt to spell bike? That sort of sound swapping activity is the sort of thing I would be doing right from the start in reception. It should have been fairly obvious and flagged her up as a child that would need some extra help.

Phono graphix considers itself not to be a phonics paradigm at all. To anybody else aware of it it obviously is. As I understand it the issue was the McGuiness didn't want it to be associated with the 'phonics' that was taught in the US at the time so they tried to pretend it wasn't.

AFAIK Sound Reading System is based on PG. It was how my niece was taught and it most definitely is phonics, although linguistic rather than synthetic. Which is I think what SW that mrz uses is.

It's interesting Micksy since the programme we use is based on
Phono Graphix (the authors are all trained in Phono Graphix) ??

Rafa
Diane McGuinness used a continuum framework that runs from "Junk Phonics" at one end, and at the other end "Complete Linguistic Phonics," which includes instructional attention to all 176ish grapheme/phoneme correspondences that comprise the English Alphabetic Code. SSP as taught in the UK has a great many similarities to CLP

Rafa, a question that DH and I asked many times before we got tired of the sound of our own voices and paid for an assessment ourselves basically we got told at different times she was 'being difficult'. 'being unco-operative', (that was Yr1 ) and in Yr 3 that 'children learn at different rates...'. That was when I blew my top and pointed out that as she was No4 and we already had one vvv academic child I could spot the difference. In fairness she outperforms in most areas academically and so the spellings problem was fairly easy to interpret as an aberration that might be insignificant (I guess, I'm trying to be kind here ) until she got a bit older and there was such an obvious gulf opening up. When she was tested, age 8, her mental processing (can't remember names of all tests) was assessed at 16+, but when she was asked to use a pen it dropped to 4+. Even now, she just scored 89% in a history paper dictating her essays, where in the same exam done on computer she scored in the 60s because she couldn't finish even with extra time, and mucked up an essay. Problem is now, because her attainment scores are so high she isn't allowed a scribe for public exams so she just has to get better at the keyboard.

Should have said that, even with a keyboard, poor spelling causes slow work because they aren't allowed to use spell check in the majority of exams.

micksey,

I should point out that it is not Prof. Diane McGuiness who distances Phono-Graphix from synthetic phonics; it is her DiL, Carmen. In her book, 'Early Reading Instruction', Prof. McGuinness actually used Jolly Phonics as an example of a phonics programme which fits with her prototype for a linguistic phonics programme.

I'll definitely agree that the claim that phono graphix was not synthetic phonics came off as more of a rant than a reasoned argument.
However, Simos used two systems, and the other, Lindamood, also pointedly refuses to identify with synthetic phonics, so I definitely think something is going on there that is not a strong endorsement of synthetic phonics.
Whilst I think there may well be some internal politics going on, I also think that both systems want to draw attention to the fact that they additionally concentrate on pre reading skills, focusing on being able to audibly recognise the individual sound components before trying to attach them to the corresponding textual items. I think this is actually what the quote mrz posted was talking about.
Looking at the failure to generalise between like and bike, this appears to be a lack of granularity beyond sound at the syllable level. This harks back to Goswami et al describing the order of differentiating between sound first at the syllable level, then onset rime, then phonemic distinctions. This certainly echoes with my experience of watching my own children learn to read.
I can easily see a gap at these very early levels of reading acquisition causing huge problems if unaddressed much further down the line because it was assumed to be already in place.

Part of the problem is that "phonics" is an umbrella term covering everything from "junk phonics" to robust high quality programmes.
Many schools say they teach "phonics" when in fact what they teach is a hotchpotch or so diluted as to be unrecognisable.

Why would gaps in early reading acquisition remain unaddressed do you think Micksy?

Handing a teacher a copy of a junk less robust phonics programme without any training isn't fair on anyone yet that's exactly what's happening in many schools.

I did wonder if it might have been Carmen and not Diane, maizie. All I remember is that someone on the RRF forum getting very tetchy whenever PG was linked to phonics.

It's what put me off SRS at first, but having seen how well my niece has done with it I've totally changed my mind.

We use Sounds Write (which is as I said earlier strongly influenced by Phono Graphix and the work of Pro McGuiness) .
Micksy you might be interested to know that the initial placement assessments focus on the child's ability to hear sounds in words.
If I say c-a-t can the child hear the word cat?
If the child says dog can they hear the separate sounds d-o-g?
Can the child say pin without the p?
(Words start simple and become more complex)
All done aurally

Which is why it surprised me that bcbg's child wasn't picked up until 7. Even JP, which is less thorough than some of the newer phonics schemes, talks about identifying children who are likely to fall behind within the first few weeks of reception based on difficulty with aural exercises.

Tbh I'd expect even teachers using poor quality phonics programs with not much knowledge to to have spotted a good reader with poor phonics skills well before 7.

My experience is that many teachers say that the child isn't picking up phonics and rather than investigating why they decide that they need to learn whole words by sight because phonics clearly doesn't suit them.

mrz - that's interesting about the Sounds Write focus on aural discrimination. I read some research (sorry, can't remember where) which highlighted that one of the key common failings in children with dyslexic traits was their inability to orally segment, blend or discriminate, not their ability to recognise grapheme/phoneme correspondence which led often to the beginning and/or ends of words being correctly written or read, but the middle part often being lost.

I'm not experienced in assessing early years teaching of reading, but from reading the complaints of the phono graphix woman, her main gripe appears that some synthetic phonics programmes concentrate too heavily on the skill of blending at the neglect of segmenting. Mrz, you say that segmenting skills are done as part of the initial placement. This seems to back up the idea that these are skills that should already be in place for many students before beginning a phonics programme, rather than forming part of the programme itself. I know sounds write does froggy talk, but I don't know if this is in the context of blending or segmenting.
A lot of the phonics debate to me seems like a fight between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean Peoples Front.
Even the oft quoted success figures of synthetic phonics seem under attack, with various groups claiming that theirs is the phonics with the high success rate.

I've mixed up sounds write with read write Inc I think.

Micksy - I'm a nursery teacher and we do an enormous amount of work on oral segmenting and blending plus general oral discrimination. Until a child is secure with this we don't move them onto the grapheme/phoneme correspondence.

Nursery is where I would expect segmenting to be done, I think.
I don't know whether it's done much in reception. I'm not taking a stance that it should be done more or less, I think that's something others would have far more useful input on. I'm only saying that it appears to be one of the elements that some of the phonics factions fight over. It could be of importance in children with dyslexia, but I'm sure there are many on here with far more experienced than I have the topic. I've only read a tiny amount on the different phonics packages and don't really understand the subtleties between the different approaches.

All I remember is that someone on the RRF forum getting very tetchy whenever PG was linked to phonics.

It was suspected that the tetchy one was Carmen under a string of false names! She wrote a perfect diatribe against SP after the Rose Report. Possibly the documment Micksey has read...

but from reading the complaints of the phono graphix woman, her main gripe appears that some synthetic phonics programmes concentrate too heavily on the skill of blending at the neglect of segmenting.

'Segmenting' is one of these terms, like 'sight words' that are interpreted in two ways. The McGuinnesses use it for what we would term 'sounding out' (a word) and for breaking a word into its sounds before spelling it. Mosy UK SPers just use it for the breaking of words into their component sounds for spelling. I'm not sure quite what Carmen was getting at here! The good SP/LP programmes teach both decoding and blending and sementing and spelling with equal focus. (It's a long time since I read that piece but I recall that SP is misunderstood/misrepresented in parts of it.) It is, however, not unknown for less well trained teachers using not very effective programmes to focus too much on reading at the expense of spelling. Very often phonics for reading is taught but not phonics for spelling...

I've said it before, and will no doubt say it again, but poor spelling, in numerical terms, is far more of a problem in the UK than poor reading. If phonics for spelling is poorly taught, or not really taught at all, far more children suffer.