Children, teenagers and adults who are undertaking any sort of intervention/dyslexia reading programme have, in virtually all cases, been badly let down by their previous instruction. Whatever teaching they have had has not taught them, explicitly and systematically, the alphabet code and the skills of blending and segmenting. 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 programmes should therefore ONLY include the most optimal activities as indicated by experimental research. Speed is also of extreme importance because, as time passes without effective remediation, students will become increasingly alienated from all aspects of literacy, education and, often, 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.

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

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

Miscue analysis/ Running Records

**Alphabet letter name learning in the early stages of reading instruction.

**Sounding out words using alphabet letter names
.
Putting letters out in an alphabet arc.

Feeling and identifying alphabet letter shapes in a bag

Cue or 'trigger' words with emphasis on first letter e.g. guitar, whale, ape, scissors

**Spelling words backwards

Learning how to use a dictionary

Phonological awareness training- without letters

'Writing' letter shapes on a person's back

**Use of books with repetitive or predictive text, leveled/banded books, or 'real' books initially.

**Onset and rime/ rhyming words/ word families

**Consonant beginning and end 'clusters' or blends.

'Story' or sentence dictation BY the student.

**Reconstruction of cut up 'story' or sentence.

Cloze text procedure

**Learning high frequency words (HFW) as global wholes.

**Learning words by outlining their shape

**Using letters shapes to remember spellings e.g. 'wheels' in mOtOr car, 'wings' in aeroplane

Visualizing words whilst looking up to the left.

Making clay/playdough/plasticine letter shapes

**Looking for words within words

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

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

Listening to the teacher read

Syllabification rules.

Grammar rules

Spelling rules

**Tailoring teaching to fit a 'visual' learning style

What are the most optimal activities as indicated by experimental 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.'' www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=173 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).'' www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=34

Also, see Room 101 for dyslexia cures and treatments, beginning reading and intervention programmes to avoid.