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?

I don't think it's the programmes as much as some teachers focus on phonics for reading and largely ignore phonics for spelling. Some parents report that it's left until late in reception or the beginning of Year 1, rather than seeing decoding and encoding as equally important. There is also the prevailing view that correcting spelling will stifle creativity.

Littlefish one of our daily activities is "sound swap"

So we might start with the word cat and ask the child if they can change it to hat (so they need to hear that the initial sound is different and identify the new sound) then change hat to hot (recognise the medial sound has changed) then change to hop - each new word changes one sound only ... Other programmes have a similar activity called full circle changing one sound until they get back to the first word. It's really useful for identifying which children have difficulty hearing the sounds and if they find certain positions within the word more difficult.

No Micksy that's not what I'm saying at all. The point of the assessment is to see if children can hear the separate sounds in words so that teaching can begin from where the child knows already. There is no expectation. In maths you wouldn't begin counting objects until the child can recite number names but you wouldn't start teaching number names 0-5 if they can already recite to 100.

Segmenting should definitely continue beyond nursery. It's one of the core sub-skills of phonics so should be happening in most lessons. I've used the sort of sound swap/full circle/chaining activities mrz described in year 1 and I've seen them used in year 2.

Mrz - I do that activity too with my more phonically confident nursery children. We start with just swapping one initial sound for another and then gradually move on to initial and final sounds, before working on all three sounds once children can segment and blend all 3 sounds in simple words.

In nursery we begin with larger units of sound - splitting compound words butter -pause- fly can they hear butterfly then move onto syllables

I have to say that exercises like the sound swap are what I imagined analytic phonics to be made up of. Having recently read the Johnston papers, I now realise what a God awful mess analytic phonics is in practise.
Why on earth do they place so little emphasis on blending and leave it so late? The shame is that I think there may be a benefit to looking at larger grain sizes and rimes as opposed to purely phonic chunks, particularly with some of English's oddities.
How could anyone possibly judge the value of onset rime analysis at specific points with specific word families when it was lumped in with so much other pap?

Playing with spoken words in the early years is great fun and helps "tune in" to the sounds of our language.
Onset and rime adds huge demands on memory.
Our specialist SEN teacher (working with children diagnosed as having SpLD) used "word races" every word on the sheet had the same rime but the onset changed (cat, bat, hat, eat, mat, sat, fat, chat, that, flat, splat ....)and the child had to read every word correctly in a set time before they could move onto the next rime ... I can't remember a single child who completed all the rimes before they left us in Y6! It was a soul destroying exercise.

I can see the use of exploring rimes like the ind in mind rind hind, however, where the correct reading is probably not the first a child would try. I think that synthetic phonics does explore word families like this, it just describes what it is doing in terms of phonic chunks. So synthetic phonics will teach the i aye sound in words like minus, siren, tiring etc. Amongst those will be mind, rind, hind, blind. The learner will pick up that ind endings are usually aye instead of ih (wind being ambiguous). I think it would be useful to more explicitly point out the whole ind chunk (and it's exceptions).
I'm pretty sure a lot of people considering themselves to be synthetic phonic teachers actually do this anyway.
I don't think there is anything precious about the specific sizings allocated to phonics. If the brain can encode a particular size chunk, it will, and there's really not anything you can do to stop it. If it's capable of encoding tion = shun it can also encode ind = ayend (I have no clue how to write phonetically, apologies for the butchering - it works in my accent) and if it can, and its in any way useful, it will.

mrz - that's what I do too (syllabification and compound word splitting). As I said, I do sound swap with the more phonically confident children, from about February onwards if they are ready.

Sorry, I read the first page but all 11? No.
Just wanted to check; has anyone mentioned Toe By Toe? It will sort the reading difficulties but a word of caution...get the Statement first then start it. DS was deemed too advanced to qualify for additional help because we started TBT way before he was assessed, at least, that's my opinion. He has suffered from a lack of assistance and support because of the fact that his reading and writing was not significantly below his peers. Doesn't mean he has found learning as easy as his peers.

The learner will pick up that ind endings are usually aye instead of ih (wind being ambiguous). I think it would be useful to more explicitly point out the whole ind chunk (and it's exceptions).

It may intuitively seem useful to you, Micksey, but that was actually the thinking behind analytic phonics and it just isn't as succesful as synthetic phonics. I worked early on with a programme similar to the one mrz described in the post before your last. It didn't work. It seems as though it should, but it just doesn't work, especially not for the children who struggle the most.

If the brain can encode a particular size chunk, it will, and there's really not anything you can do to stop it. If it's capable of encoding tion = shun it can also encode ind = ayend

In a way you might conclude from that line of thought that the brain could 'encode' whole words 'as a chunk' and then we come back full circle to learning words as 'wholes'.

And we also come back full circle to the fact that both the connectionist and dual route cascade model support varying grain sizes and no theory on the market believes children learn English reading by phonics alone.
As far as I can tell, no research has ever investigated synthetic phonics supported by larger grains and analytics for certain words only without also bringing in a load of look and say nonsense and mixed methods right from the start. The Johnston data is limited and should not be used to say there is one perfect method that cannot be improved upon.

Full word encoding, or any encoding is probably a myth and simplification anyway. What I think you're really doing is setting up a neighbourhood. So for mind you will set up a neighbourhood including they individual phonic sounds, but also when you go through words with the same sound in them, they will be stored in greater proximity. When you read mind m, I,n,d, will trigger. Nd will trigger during words containing that grouping and ind will trigger find, hind, in will trigger in, win etc. As you get better at reading, some of the features will have stronger and some lesser input until the correct word results each time.
Phonics teaching lays down super strong building blocks and also lots of words containing those sounds.

As an example, if you read the word tasukete, you're likely to pronounce the ending as ettay instead of eet, as the features of the word will have triggered it as being in a Japanese neighbourhood.

How do you know how to pronounce "foreign" words correctly? By hearing the correct pronunciation... So whether you are an experienced adult reader or a beginner reader the word needs to be in your vocabulary before you can correctly identify the pronunciation from the written form.

For mind, kind, find the child will have lots if experience of the words and will have been taught that it's most likely to be the /ie/ sound but if that doesn't work try /i/ ... The wind blew.

I'm pretty sure I read that Japanese word correctly without knowing it to be honest.

Without any knowledge of Japanese words?

But once you have synthetic supported by larger grains isn't what you have analytic phonics anyway? What you're suggesting might work for those with those might work with the most able, but it is a huge ask on those with memory issues. You would have to start from the point of teaching i as a spelling for /ie/ anyway. Then teach ind, ild, ire etc on top. The danger here being that you are taking away time, that for the children that struggle is better spent practicing reading and writing spellings for /ie/.

With exposure your most able and middle ability will pick up that some letter combinations preceding or following a grapheme might give tham a clue as to which pronunciation to try first. But for the least able, probably those with memory issues, you've massively increased the amount of stuff they have to remember. 150-180 PGCs and the ability to blend and segment is much easier than a fairly endless list of rimes. And then can learn to read without it.

There are a handful of chunks I would teach. But I wouldn't really be spending any huge amount of time in R or Yr 1 focusing on rime or word families.

I disagree, mrz. In languages with simple orthography where 1 sound = 1 spelling and vice versa it's perfectly easy to read a word as long as you know the code and the rules for which syllable to emphasise. Obviously you won't be able to extract meaning without the word in your vocab, but pronunciation shouldn't be an issue.

Turkish works similarly to some written forms of Japanese in that respect. There are possibly other languages too.

That's fine if you know the sounds of the language Rafa.

As an example, if you read the word tasukete, you're likely to pronounce the ending as ettay instead of eet

Apparently it's pronounced four syllables

tah-soo-keh-teh

That's exactly as I would have pronounced it, ending in ehteh is the same as ending in ettay, I'm just not terribly good at writing phonetically.
For the vast majority of words, I think synthetic phonics teaches in absolutely the perfect way to lay down the most efficient networks. In a perfectly regular language, it would be ideal. But I think it was raffals actually who pointed out that most of his students had been taught that where an a follows a w it's often pronounced o, and this happens in some very common words like was want and watch. This is basically teaching this neighbourhood of words together and strengthening the connections between them all. I don't know when would be the most appropriate time to do this but it doesn't sound like anything synthetic phonics advocates would disapprove of, more that they would probably describe what they are doing in a different way, that they are teaching that a can sometimes be o.
There are about eight different possible pronunciations of a in English. It's very handy to learn the groups together so you can use the surrounding features to help. I'd be amazed if most phonics teachers didn't do this anyway.

Japanese is syllabic so the eh is part of the keh not ether