MidYIS Reading Test: Assessment of Phonological & Phonic Abilities

1. MidYIS Reading Test:Assessment of Phonological & Phonic Abilities Bernardine King

2. Summary • Dyslexia – what is it? • Theoretical rationale behind the test sections. • What will the results look like? • Limitations of test – what can it be used for?

3. Purpose of Test Part of a new reading test for MidYIS intended to assess various levels of literacy ability: • Phonological & phonic skills. Providing information useful in deciding who may need specialist assessment for dyslexia, etc. • Vocabulary – picture and sound. • Comprehension - component skills, e.g. inference making.

4. Rose Report, June 2009 What is Dyslexia? The review’s working definition: • A learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling.

5. What is Dyslexia? 2. Characteristic difficulties in: • phonological awareness • verbal memory • verbal processing speed.

6. What is Dyslexia? 3.Occurs across the range of intellectual abilities. 4. A continuum, not a distinct category. 5. No clear cut-off points.

7. Ehri’s phases of Reading Development Letter-sound links: Increasing alphabetic skill Consolidated All links including exception spellings Full alphabetic All regular spellings Partialalphabetic Some =‘partial’ Pre-alphabetic None, iconicreading: eg m in mcDonalds

8. Partial Alphabetic Phase • Letter confusions, b/d, p/q/ • Nonword reading problems: • ‘pib’ ‘dalop’ • Salient lettersof words attended to, eg 1st & last letters

9. Rationale Behind the Test Sections • Test phonological and phonic skills. • Phonology- word sounds. • Phonological processing deficit in dyslexia. • Phonic problems – relating graphemes (letters & letter groups) to the corresponding sounds (phonemes).

10. Tests of Phonology- • Made-up word (nonword) reading, adaptive test. • ‘Sounds’ test – identifying sounds in words. • Phonological Short Term Memory- forward & backward digit span.

11. Phonics • Nonword reading- relating graphemes to phonemes. • ‘Sounds’- sounds to letters, as in spelling. • Pseudohomophone test- made-up words (pseudowords) that sound like real words, e.g. phocks = fox. Also, test of phonology.

12. Pseudohomophone Test • Pseudo = made-up word • Homophone = sounds like • Requires many visual and auditory skills: e.g. reading ‘phocks’ grapheme separation: ‘ph’ ‘o’ ‘ck’ ‘s’ grapheme-phoneme conversion: ‘ph’> /f/ ‘o’> /o/ ‘ck’ > /k/ ‘s’> /s/ Phoneme blending: /f/ /o/ /k/ /s/ Then..

13. Pseudohomophone Test cont. • Match sound package of blended phonemes with items in known sound vocabulary. /f/ + /o/ + /k/ + /s/ = ‘fox’ Added difficulty – word search format. Visual search problems in dyslexia. Choose 5 out of 16 on each of 5 screens.

14. Guessing • Nonword reading: 1 in 4 chance. Forced choice multiple choice. • ‘Sounds’: 1 in 4 chance. Forced choice multiple choice. • Word Search (pseudohomophones): 5 in 16 chance. Can move on without answering.

15. Memory • Problems with phonological STM common in dyslexia. Order problems- e.g. telephone numbers. • Backward digit span –measure of working memory. • Short backward digit span often found in dyslexia.

16. Design of Sub Tests ‘Nonword reading’ and ‘Sounds’ – adaptive, to: • match difficulty of items to student ability; • Reduce assessment load and time.

17. Design of Sub Tests • ‘Lyrebird’ Test – an adaptation of a spoken digit span test for computer. • Lack of visual distraction- black screen with fixation spot. • Response entered on screen. • Max number of digits = 8, to reduce assessment load and time.

18. Non-Verbal Reasoning • 22 questions • 8 minutes maximum

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22. Uses & Limitations of the Test • Audit of phonological abilities of a cohort. • Shows strengths & weaknesses. • Does notdiagnose dyslexia. • Cannot identify ‘recovered’ dyslexic readers. • Unlikely to identify visual / surface dyslexia. • Shows marked phonological / phonic difficulties.