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What NOT to do

Students of all ages who are undertaking any sort of literacy intervention or dyslexia programme have, in virtually all cases, been badly let down by their previous reading instruction. Whatever teaching they have received in the past has not taught them, explicitly and systematically, the alphabet code and the skills of blending for reading and segmenting for spelling. As a result of this mal-instruction they have also acquired unhelpful strategies and become victims of the Matthew Effect. The content of all intervention / dyslexia programmes should therefore ONLY include the most optimal activities as indicated by empirical research.

Intervention speed is of great importance because, as time passes without effective remediation, students may become increasingly alienated from all aspects of education, sometimes even society itself. Unnecessary activities, although not directly harmful to reading skill development, supplant effective practice and cause further delay. All time spent in 1-1 or small group work needs to really make a difference, FAST.

''Time is not just precious, it is finite. Reading interventions must never waste students' time'' Dianne Murphy.

As Dr.Steven Dykstra points out, ''There are only 2 ways to improve any treatment effort: 
1. You can identify better ways of doing things and do more of them.
2. You can identify less effective ways of doing things and do less of them.
The two often go hand in hand since there are only so many hours and resources.  We must almost always do less of something in order to do more of something else.  So, if we want to provide more effective instruction we must go through the process of identifying those things which are less effective or even harmful.  Unfortunately, no one likes it when their way of doing things loses out and is selected for extinction''

The following activities are unnecessary (time wasting), ineffective, and in some cases harmful (marked**), and should play no part in any dyslexia / intervention / catch-up or basic skills programme. To a layperson's eyes many of these tasks may seem extraordinary and nonsensical (they are!), nevertheless, most of these activities appear in one or more well regarded, sometimes government funded programmes.

**Word 'prediction' based on the picture, context or initial letter/s

**Alphabet letter name learning before fluency in applying sounds is achieved

**Sounding out words using alphabet letter names when spelling for themselves

Putting letter shapes out in an alphabet arc and chanting the names.

Feeling and identifying alphabet letter shapes in a bag

**Memorising key or cue words as whole shapes

**Learning that some letters in some words are 'silent' e.g. wrong, gnome, thumb, knock, guest

**Writing or spelling words backwards -see Room 101 NLP Magical spelling.

Learning how to use a dictionary

Doing phonological awareness activities - without letters

Using a finger to form invisible letter shapes or words on a person's back / forearm / textured board...

**Using books with repetitive or predictive text or 'real' books for initial independent reading practice.

**Onset and rime / rhyming word families e.g b-ake, m-ake, st-ake, sh-ake...

**Spelling families (visual only) e.g. the 'gh' family: light, cough, ghost, though, laugh, weight, caught, plough, Hugh...
-the 'ea' family: bread, cream, early, heart, bear, steak, plateau

**Learning adjacent consonants (blends) as whole units (onsets) e.g. sp-, cl-, str-, br-...

'Story' or sentence dictation by the student for the tutor to write down.

Reconstructing a cut up sentence using words with as yet untaught code.

**Skipping words in the text and reading on.

**Substituting words as long as the meaning of the text is preserved e.g. 'bug' for beetle, 'apple' for apricot

**Using the phrase, ''That letter says its name''

**Using the prompts, "Does that look right?", "Does that sound right?" and "Does that make sense?"

**Using nonsense/pseudo-words with illegal English spellings e.g. traick, feadge, mnoyv, werzz, smifph, goeti, xnieel...

**Quizzes and exercises with a focus on spotting deliberate spelling mistakes

**Memorising high frequency words (HFWs) or 'tricky' words as whole shapes.

Drawing an outline around words to form shapes

Filling in letter shape boxes to form words.

Using letters shapes to remember spellings e.g. wheel shapes in motor car, humps in camel.

Visualizing words whilst looking up to the left -see Room 101 NLP Magical spelling.

Writing words using the opposite hand

Writing words using 'bubble' or 'rainbow' writing

Writing words with eyes shut or blindfolded.

Making clay / playdough / plasticine / toothpaste / pipe cleaner... letter shapes

**Looking for little words within longer words

Learning mnemonics for spelling e.g. big elephants can always understand small elephants =because

**Look/say/cover/write/check -see spelling

Word searches and crosswords with high frequency or topic words

Listening to the teacher / a sports personality / celebrity / famous author or poet...reading

- Using an untrained (in synthetic phonics) parent, teaching assistant or a dog (!) to listen to struggling readers read.

Syllabification rules: for example, ''kettle is split as ket-tle because <ket> is a closed syllable with a short vowel, <tle> is a regular final syllable'' http://www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4544

Grammar rules

Spelling rules: for example, 'i before e except after c' and 'magic 'e'..

Tailoring teaching to fit a perceived thinking / learning style, brain type, or 'intelligence'

What are the most optimal activities as indicated by research?

''One remarkable study conducted in 1985 by Carr and Evans in Canada showed this by recording ‘time on task’ for each individual child on 50 occasions per child over several months. They then correlated ‘time on task’ with each child’s reading-test score. They found that ‘ONLY three activities were positively and significantly correlated to reading skill: that is, the more time spent on these activities the higher the reading scores were. These are: practice segmenting and blending sounds in words (phonemes), specific phonics activities such as learning letter-sound relationships, and writing words, phrases and sentences, by copying or from memory’. The memorizing of sight words, lessons on vocabulary and grammar and listening to the teacher read showed strong negative correlations to reading scores – in other words, the more time children spent on these activities, the poorer their reading test scores were.'' http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=173&n_issueNumber=59 These findings have been replicated by others -see 'Sumbler and Willows' study, below

''Interestingly, it was found that out of these ten activities, only two were highly correlated with success in reading and spelling. These two were: ‘phonics’ (which included all phonics activities involving print, letter-sound correspondences, blending, segmenting, detecting sounds in words all with printed form of the word), and ‘letter formation’ (which involved talking about the shapes of letters, writing letters and words in context of learning letter-sound relationships). These were the only activities that mattered in terms of subsequent reading and spelling performance. However, equally important was the finding that six activities made no difference whatsoever to reading and spelling success, and two activities were actually related to worse reading and spelling achievement. The six activities that made no difference were: ‘Auditory phonological awareness’ (in the absence of print), ‘sight word learning’ (learning to recognise whole words as units without sounding out), ‘reading/grammar’ (grammar or punctuation explanations, reading by children that appeared to be real reading usually with the teacher), ‘concepts of print’ (learning about reading, chanting pattern books), ‘real writing’ (included any attempts to write text), ‘letter name learning’ (included only the learning of letter names, not sounds). The two activities that resulted in worse achievement were: ‘non-literacy activities’ (such as play, drawing, colouring, crafts), and ‘oral vocabulary’ (language development, story discussions, show and tell, teacher instructions).''

''(W)e need to act on the realization that every minute counts and that instructional time is a scarce and non–renewable resource, to be treasured and used wisely and with maximum possible effectiveness.'' palisadesk. RRF message board.

Also, see Room 101 and 'your options' for dyslexia treatments and intervention programmes to avoid.