[senco-forum] RE: surface dyslexia

89 Bedford Rd
East Finchley
London N2 9DB
+44  (0) 208 444 1594
0781 425 9134 (mob)
e: naomi at sen-burgess.demon.co.uk

Thanks for questions and suggestions etc and below I elaborate
on the KS4 student with dyslexic difficulties and why I I thought that they
indicated a surface as opposed to phonologically based dyslexia.
Additionally the dyspraxic difficulties.

Unusually bright, mature and sparky young man. Pulled up for behaviour
problems in an independent school where there is little curriculum
differentiation in any event, let alone for those with identifiable probably
only spld and aspergers as it is selective. 

In terms of General Cognitive Ability he scores around the 98th centile,
pretty evenly across the board.
The Towre- Test of word reading efficiency, indicated that he had the
reverse of what one would usually expect i.e phonemic decoding efficiency
standard score of 100 but sight word efficiency standard score 88. Followed
this up with WORD Reading Comprehension where he got a standard score 118!
But reading began to fall apart at a level which would have been standard
score of 75 and virtually fallen apart a bit later. He was reading
everything twice over, with no automaticity and relying on semantic/context-
he was having to feel, sense and piece together the little paragraphs. He
had had some relative difficulty with design recall on the BAS, in that he
though he had visualised and recalled the designs, but actually had not, but
they were nearly all 'near misses'. In spelling he made logical errors and
had an SS of 87. In a free writing piece he could not see his errors.

Therefore I concluded (for the moment) that he was able to decode somewhat
efficiently SS 100, but not as well as he should have and 2 standard
deviations below his GCA, but was severely inefficient with sight reading,
and super duper with semantics and context.

Additionally he has focus and attn difficulties/clumsiness-lots of scars
from accidents- planning and organisations problems.

Initially recommended getting a specialist teacher to begin with, plus
adjustments in class, + assistive tech, + increasing frequency of reading +
vocab list + particular attention in mathematics re
geometry/nets/transformations/graphs, and a behavioural optometry check.

So, ready to be shot down in flames about surface dyslexia if anyone feels
like it, but I got there thru looking at the curious discrepancy on the
TOWRE, which stumped me for a bit. But I'm definitely not saying he has no
phono probs....

But the proof of the pudding, as we all know is in the eating, and that was
enough for him and me of a medical model. Now it has to be back to the
social model to see what fits, and how he will make most progress.

Naomi (EP)