Children, teenagers and adults who are undertaking any sort of literacy intervention or dyslexia 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 / dyslexia 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 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, detrimental**, 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 predicting (guessing) based on the picture, context or initial letter/s

Miscue analysis (NTF DVD p29) -see Assessments

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

**Sounding out words using alphabet letter names

Putting letter shapes 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, scissors

**Writing or spelling words backwards

Learning how to use a dictionary

Phonological awareness activities - without letters

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

**Use of books with repetitive or predictive text or 'real' books initially.

**Onset and rime / rhyming words

**Spelling families (visual only) e.g. the 'gh' family: light, cough, ghost, though, laugh, weight, caught, plough, Hugh...

**Consonant beginning and end 'clusters' learnt as whole units e.g. sp-, cl-, str-, -nd, -lk....

'Story' or sentence dictation BY the student.

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

**Skipping words in the text and reading on

**Substituting words that make sense in the text and with the picture e.g. 'bug' for beetle, 'cream' for custard

Cloze text procedure

**Learning high frequency words (HFWs) globally- see synthetic phonics for the 9 HFWs that may need to be memorised as whole units.

**Learning words by outlining their shape

**Learning words by filling in letter shape boxes

**Using letters shapes to remember spellings e.g. wheel shapes in mOtOr car, wing shapes in aeroplane...

Visualizing words whilst looking up to the left.

Writing spellings using the opposite hand

Writing spellings in 'bubble writing'.

Writing spellings with eyes shut or blindfolded.

Making clay / playdough / plasticine / toothpaste... 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

Word searches / Crosswords

Reading to a dog (!) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8027910.stm

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

Syllabification rules e.g. ''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 e.g. 'i before e except after c'

**Tailoring teaching to fit a perceived learning style, brain type, or 'intelligence' (NTF DVD p4)

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.'' 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).''
http://rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=34&n_issueNumber=46

''(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 for dyslexia treatments, beginning reading, and intervention programmes to avoid.