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?

Mrz, you're stretching. I read it exactly as you gave the pronunciation. It's pretty simple and predictable. Try listening to people occasionally instead of instantly placing yourself in opposition for the sake of it.

Synthetic and linguistic phonics teaches that sounds are represented by symbols (letters or combinations of letters)
That one sound can be represented by one, two, three or four letters
That one sound can have more than one spelling /o/ can be in hot in swat in Australia because cough knowledge
That one spelling can represent more than one sound. The spelling can be /a/ in cat /o/ in what /ar/ in father /or/ in water /ae/ in apron.. Children are taught to notice which is the most common, to notice that often represents /o/ after the sound /w/ quad, quality, quaff, swan, swamp, was, want ...recognising that it's the preceding sound not letter that's important.

Micksy I'm told by a Japanese speaker that the pronunciation sounds nothing like what you originally wrote

IIRC that might have been to do with tricky words and the inflexibility of the way letters and sounds is being interpreted by teachers. I think the words I gave were was, want and what because those are the ones commonly taught as sight words. Obviously those words would be included in my teaching but there are plenty of others as well. And it isn't an absolute rule. There are plenty of 'wa' words where the a is /a/. All I did was direct children towards the possibility that if the previous sound was /w/ then they might need to consider /o/ as a possible pronunciation.

It's a million miles away from teaching 'wa' as a chunk like 'ind' or 'at' or 'it' IMO.

I think we're arguing semantics. I'm not suggesting to teach children to sound out wa as a phonic chunk in a word, so that watch would be sounded wo-t-ch. I'm suggesting to help them recognise it as a feature of a word, meaning that the choice of sounds tried out is affected. This seems to me to be pretty much what you're saying as well. I'd agree that teaching was want and what as sight words neglects the regularity of the consonants in those words and makes it a more difficult task than it needs to be.

I'd agree...

YAY!

You might be right about the semantics but I think I've misunderstood what you've meant by learning word chunks or rimes. I was assuming you meant what is usually taught with analytic phonics but I'm not sure you actually do. I think reading eggs is a good example of this. I think it teaches the sounds 'an' and 'in' as discrete units of sound. But I'm not sure that's what you were talking about at all.

If we're talking about using the sounds/letters around a grapheme to give a clue as to the most likely pronunciation, that's different IMO. It's what proficient adult readers do, but I think you have to be quite cautious about expecting early readers to do that too much. There are skills I'd want them to be secure at first to avoid confusion.

Maizie, I have never advocated whole word teaching (although some grains may encompass whole words. Even in very standard synthetic phonics air is learned as a whole word). I have explicitly said on many, many occasions that I am not advocating whole word teaching as a systematic strategy. Only you and mrz have interpreted me as saying this. I have always been a supporter of synthetic phonics in general principal (though i think its naive and arrogant to think it's a perfect system) and am glad you are finally recognising this.
I do believe that whole words will be learned regardless of teaching methods employed. I'm not even opposed to them being consolidated in certain short contexts: is, you, was. I'm fairly firm in my belief that words like said have whole word representations in some kind of lexical entry, though I believe longer irregular words may have less intuitive representations.
If anyone had actually bothered reading my posts rather than looking to win victory points, they would have realised all this a long time ago.

Rafals, I had a total misconception of analytic phonics until I read Johnston. I thought it taught the phonic sounds but then practised them by switching them within existing words rather than sounding out the whole lot from scratch. I had no idea it was mixed methods under a different name.

Under the NLS it got taught as 1 part of a mixed methods strategy as well which really didn't help children at all. It's never failed to amaze me how people expect children to do anything other than guess if you don't teach children to blend until term 3 of reception but give them books from day 1. It's not like they've got anything else to fall back on.

As I recall, Micksey, this whole debate started withyour disagreement with the proposition that children who read 'strom' as 'storm' are not good readers. It has wandered far and wide since then!

BTW. It is coincidental that 'air' happens to be a whole word. It is also a grapheme which represents th r affected vowel sound found in pair, pare and pear and is taught as such.

I would stand by skilled readers correcting strom to storm. I know I would if I came across it in text. I also if you recall provided a direct quote from seidenberg, one of the two main thinkers on the topic, that correcting to known words was an essential part of the self teaching mechanism.
In pare the air sound is taught as two phonemes. There is nothing intrinsic or special about the size of the units other than the purpose they serve. If you wanted to break the sounds into their individual components truly, you would have to look at mouth shapes, I would imagine.
Similarly, I see no benefit to breaking up the unit ould in could would should, as doing so increases rather than decreases learning complexity, which should surely be the ultimate goal.

Correcting to known words does not include changing the phoneme order as set out in the written word. It seems you have used much the same principle to make Seidenburg's narrative fit your thesis.

Good forbid we ever switch phoneme order, particularly not if ironing in Edinburgh on a Wednesday.

In fact, since the ro in iron is pronounced or, strom should be a perfectly valid phonic reading of storm anyway! Job done :)

Clutching at straws. It's not an 'i orn'. If anything most people pronounce it 'eye'n' or 'ire' (as in fire) 'n'...

Good forbid we ever switch phoneme order, particularly not if ironing in Edinburgh on a Wednesday

Oh, FFS. You are missing phonemes out or putting them into those words but you are not altering the order in which the written ones are pronounced. If you really think that altering the phoneme order in a word is no big deal then there is no debate and I'm putting the evil eye on you

I would stand by skilled readers correcting strom to storm. I know I would if I came across it in text.

Hopefully if it was on a page with just three other pseudo words and you had been explicitly told these aren't real words just decode what you see ...you wouldn't ...or would you?

Haha, no, you don't have to put the evil eye on me maizie (though I note you didn't go near Edinbruh :) ). The truth is, I have no idea how Seidenberg's correction mechanism is supposed to work. None of us do. Strom may be judged as being in close proximity to storm, because of the commonality of its components, or reverses may block proximity. Who knows?
Having read a lot of papers, it's clear even the experts don't totally understand each other. Johnston misrepresents the dual route cascade model (so badly that even I can see the faults in his argument), DRC purists misrepresent connectionists.
I think a little more open mindedness and a little less staunch adherence to dogma would go a very long way.
Having looked up huge amounts of papers recently, I'm now fairly convinced of the usefulness of the alien words in the phonics test. If anything, I think they're probably under utilised and could be used to profile for dyslexia, rather than just issuing a pass or fail. I'm not actually sure that I believe in "good" readers who fail on alien words. There just aren't that many stroms to make a difference, whether they get corrected or not.

Micksy pseudo words have been used by SENCOs and Ed Psychs for decades to identify "dyslexia".

Just to let you know, a formal diagnostic assessment can be carried out by either an Educational Psychologist (EP) or a Specialist Teacher (holding the relevant SpLD level 7 certificate). The latter are usually cheaper for a dyslexia assessment whereas the EP assesses for other things as well as dyslexia.

The above is usually about £300-400, however, you can get what is called an "assessment for teaching" - this usually takes a couple of hours and includes formal reading/spelling tests and informal writing and phonological awareness tests, and is used to identify the learners areas of difficulty so that these can be specifically addressed in a teaching program. This test is much cheaper and can be done by a specialist teacher holding an SpLD level 5 certificate, and they can make recommendations to the school and put together a suitable intervention for your child if required.

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