Dyslexia Treatment


​As at May 2021, the cost of specialist literacy intervention is $80 including GST per half-hour session.  

Maximum Literacy Progress
We provide specialist literacy instruction for children who are struggling or failing to acquire literacy in the school system.  Sometimes these children will have received additional literacy support from various sources including the Resource Teacher, a Teacher Aide, 'programmes' such as Lexia, Steps Web or Toe by Toe, or tutoring from KipMcGrath.  Literacy research tells us that children who experience ongoing literacy difficulties tend to have complex learning difficulties including working memory difficulty and phonological and orthographic processing and recall difficulties.  Sometimes they also have ADHD or a Developmental Language Disorder.  These children need expert literacy intervention!  

Critical Intervention Window
Everything changes in Year 4 when the focus is longer on learning to read and write and the focus becomes reading and writing to learn.  It is absolutely critical that children who are behind in literacy get specialist literacy intervention as soon as possible to catch them up as much as possible before the end of Year 3 to ensure the best possible academic outcome for them.   

Literacy 'programmes' don't work!
Intervention research tells us that one-size-fits-all programmes don't work.  What works is individualised, one-to-one intervention based on careful assessment that is targeted at the child's zone of proximal development (i.e.: what the child is ready to learn next).  That is exactly what we do:  We conduct assessment of specific, critical literacy skills and provide expert, one-to-one literacy intervention (including work-arounds for any other learning difficulties) to achieve maximum literacy progress as soon as possible. 

Structured Literacy
The International's Dyslexia Association recommends the structured literacy approach for treating Dyslexia and any other reading and writing difficulties.  Structured Literacy is also referred to as 'the Code,' 'The Science of Reading,' Multi-sensory Structured Language (MSL),' or 'The Orton-Gillingham Approach.'  Structured Literacy uses proven specific, systematic, explicit, multi-sensory and cumulative teaching methods.  Our advice: make sure any literacy intervention your child gets is based on a Structured Literacy approach and steer clear of the Reading Recovery programme and the 'Whole Language' approach employed by the Ministry of Education over the past 20+ years, as these have been proved ineffective.

Cautions

There are a lot of literacy intervention and products available that may not be evidence-based, despite being popular because they are aggressively marketed.  Our advice:  Stay away from non-phonetic treatments including isolated visual or ear exercises or lenses.  Below is some additional information to help you decide the best way to help your child achieve literacy.

Vision Therapy and Dyslexia: What you need to know
This is a helpful article from the website understood.org that clarifies when vision therapy is and is not appropriate for children who are struggling with reading.

MUSEC Briefings
These are helpful publications from Macquarie University in Australia about the scientific basis or the lack of science of various interventions out there that are being used to help children who are struggling with reading:

Choosing Effective Programs for Low-Progress Readers
​Irlen Tinted Lenses and Overlays
Explicit Instruction for Students with Special Learning Needs
Mnemonics
Book Levelling
Reading Recovery for Young Struggling Readers
Curriculum-Based Measurement of Reading
Cogmed
The Listening Program
Behavioural Optometry
The Cellfield Reading Intervention
Brain Gym
​Fast ForWord Language
The Davis Dyslexia Program
Sources:
Retrieved from https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/healthy-people/centres/macquarie-university-special-education-centre-musec/community-outreach-overview/musec-briefings#MB23 on 18/01/2018