[senco-forum] Dyslexia in the Genomic Era

I agree with you, too, Philippa!

I was very careful to say that 'decoding' was the lower order skill; the ability to understand and make make use of the information in text (whether to advance learning, obtain information, or for entertainment) is a higher order skill and clearly dependent on cognitive ability.  Would it be fair to say that a child who cannot do this would also be a child who cannot respond effectively to spoken language?

But until children are taught to decode there is no way of knowing whether or not progress to higher order reading skills will be made.  

We have a child just entering Y9 who came to us from a primary school which was extremely concerned about his ability to cope with mainstream secondary.  "He will not be able to achieve anything without full time support" was clearly stated in his file.  His Reading & Comprehension Age was below the lower limit of the test (6y 5m), his Word Reading Age was 6y 9m & his Spelling Age 7y6m.  After 15 months on the Ruth Miskin programme his Word Reading was 11y 1m and his Spelling Age 10y 6m (which compares favourably with many of his peers).  He gets very little support (we have very few, overstretched, TAs) but is able to participate in all his lessons, shows understanding, and has, in my view and that of all his teachers, thoroughly confounded the prognostications of his primary school.  His Reading & Comprehension Age in July this year was 9y 10m, which says more about the limitations of his vocabulary than it does about his decoding skills.  He won't do anything for our 5
 A*-C stats in Y11, but he has a life skill which will always be of use to him.  Who could have guessed that learning to decode effectively would do so much for him?

Maggie

Paul and Philippa Bodien <bodien at gmail.com> wrote: I agree.  But how is "severely" defined?  

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