Successful treatment of sublexical reading deficits in a child with dyslexia of the mixed type

Spelling improvement through letter-sound and whole-word training in two multilingual Greek- and English- speaking children

“…Following training that targeted sublexical processes we observed improvement in spelling. This is in line with the findings of the training study carried out by Brunsdon et al (2002a) using similar techniques with a monolingual child with mixed dyslexia. Improvement was also observed in LK's reading, in line with the findings of other studies targeting spelling (Brunsdon et al, 2005;Kohnen et al 2008a, b).…”

“…Each week, six letters or digraphs were taught following the order of the Jolly Phonics scheme. Each letter was related to a word that LK sounded out and wrote, based on the procedure of Brunsdon et al (2002a). For example, if the target letter was U, LK was presented with the letter written on a card and was asked to look at a card with a word beginning with that letter written on it (e.g., <up>).…”

“…The training included explicit teaching of phonics, following Hatcher's (1994) programme, it used the Jolly Phonics materials (Lloyd et al 1992) and procedures used in Brunsdon et al (2002a) intervention case study. The main difference between Brunsdon et al's study and ours is that they trained reading whereas spelling was targeted in the present study.…”

“…We wanted to further examine whether interventions that have been found to be successful with monoliterate dysgraphic participants (Brunsdon et al 2002a(Brunsdon et al , 2002bBrunsdon et al, 2005;Kohnen et al 2008aKohnen et al , 2008b would achieve the same results with polyglot children. We aimed to examine which type of training would be more effective for these polyglot children with spelling difficulties and whether the intervention might result in improvement in reading as well as spelling, in accordance with findings from other intervention case studies (Brunsdon et al, 2005;Kohnen et al 2008aKohnen et al , 2008b.…”

“…Initially, a sublexical spelling intervention was administered for both children. The intervention was based on a study conducted by Brunsdon et al (2002a). The researchers targeted sublexical reading processes of an eight-year-old boy who had mixed dyslexia.…”