Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Does my daughter have a reading issue? What kind?

My daughter, let's call her Twin B, is 8 years old and in third grade. (She has a fraternal twin sister.) We've long suspected that she has issues with reading, partly because she's bright (quantified below) but scrapes along at grade level in reading. A year or two ago, she seemed to be having trouble with sounding out novel words; she could read lots of words as sight words, but new words, names etc., flummoxed her. She seems to have gotten her head around decoding in the last six months, but now she's having difficulties with comprehension. She reads lots of comics and graphic novels, but almost no chapter books. (She did go through a phase of reading lots of Rainbow Magic Fairy books.) She recently said that when trying to read a particular chapter book, she would read two or three pages, then forget what had happened in the story. I've noticed that she can't learn to do something (prepare packaged food, for instance) by silently reading the instructions, but can if I have her read me the instructions out loud. When I mentioned this to her teacher (same teacher this year and last; we have two-year classrooms in our alternative public school), the teacher said that, while she'd done well on the comprehension assessments last year, she had needed to �talk out� the answers to do so. For a few months now, she's been seeing a private reading and writing tutor who seems experienced and perceptive. Her handwriting is dreadful and her spelling is weak. All of this sounds to me like she's got some kind of reading challenge that she's compensating for � adequately, so far, but she could be heading for a crash if we don't figure out what the issue is. If possible, I would like to identify her specific reading challenges in a way that would help the tutor, or someone else, help her more effectively. E.g., are we looking at stealth dyslexia, dysgraphia, CAPD,.....?

We had a neuropsychological and academic evaluation done last year (about 8 months ago, shortly after winter break of 2nd grade).

WISC-V:
Components (scaled score/percentile):
Verbal similarlities 18/99%
Vocabulaty 18/99%
Block Design 12/75%
Visual Puzzles 16/98%
Matrix Reasoning 14/91%
Figure Weights 16/98%
Working memory � digit span 13/84%
Working memory � picture span 15/95%
Processing speed � coding 9/37%
Symbol Search � 12/75%
Scale composites (standard score/percentile)
Verbal Comprehension 146/99%
Visual Spatial 122/93%
Fluid Reasoning 128/97%
Working Memory 122/93%
Processing Speed 103/58%
Full Scale IQ 130/98%

WJ IV:Cog:
Letter-Pattern Matching 105/63%
Pair Cancellation 101/52%
Cognitive Processing Speed 103/58%
Letter-Pattern Matching 105/63%
Number-Pattern Matching 97/43%
Perceptual Speed 100/51%

WJ IV:OL:
Rapid Picture Naming 97/42%
Retrieval Fluency 111/77%
Speed of Lexical Access 102/54%

WJ IV Ach � Reading (Actually, it says IV one place and III another)
Letter-Word Identification 105/62%
Sentence Reading Fluency 116/86%
Passage Comprehension 115/84%
Broad Reading 114/82%
Word Attack 101/53%
Oral Reading Fluency 97/43%

WJ IV Ach � Writing (same comment about III/IV)
Spelling 92/30%
Sentence Writing Fluency 100/51%
Writing Samples 117/59%
Spelling of Sounds 112/78%

I will note that, despite these scores, the assessors felt there was some kind of reading/writing issue. I quote in part �As seen on other word reading measures, [Twin B] relied on whole word recognition, rather than decoding, and made a large number of substitutions, additions, and omissions. While still earning a score within the average range, her actual oral reading was quite inaccurate....While [Twin B]'s strong vocabulary was seen in her writing, her spelling weaknesses precluded her from being able to produce a fluent writing sample (e.g. The boy is rolr skatng on a flat srfis, The momy bride is feeding her baby chik)....As the demands increase and the reading material becomes more academic, [Twin B] will likely struggle to demonstrate her wide fund of knowledge without reading and writing support.�

I appreciate any suggestions any of you may have.

Based on the testing you've posted, I would agree that she likely presents with some kind of reading/writing disability. Though it seems that she has picked up some level of phonics skill, her phonetic decoding is still far below where you would expect someone with this level of verbal ability to perform. Her stronger reading and writing skills all occur in context (in sentences or passages), rather with single words. That's an indication that her naked encoding/decoding skills are not that strong; she's probably using rote memory and cognition to compensate for below-average phonetic decoding skills.

Processing speed and retrieval efficiency are also concerns, with speeded tasks noticeably lower-performing than her mean, both with and without fine motor demands. This can be associated with weaknesses in attaining automaticity, which has implications for reading decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, written expression (especially extended), and math fact fluency.

You have enough data to support a diagnosis of a reading disability already.

I have to run, but I'll try to get back with some more input if no one else mentions it first.

I. Suggest you start by researching regulations and services where you are. It does sound like the teacher won't dismiss your concerns though which is a good thinv. Hope it goes well.

The district's general policy seems to be that if a kid is at grade level, there's nothing they have to do. I know the law can be read differently than that, but until we get to the point where there's a specific classroom support or intervention we want and are not getting, it is just simpler to pursue things privately rather than to try to force the district's hand. We're very lucky to have the resources that we can do that.

Thank you! I would love to hear your or anyone's thoughts on what the specific issue might be, or who we might consult to pin it down further.

The gold standard for dyslexia (which is high on the list of diagnostic possibilities) --or really for any reading difficulty, whether strictly diagnosed as a disability -- is structured phonological processing and phonics instruction, usually in the form of Orton-Gillingham-type reading instruction. School- and clinic-based intervention usually consists of classic OG or Wilson tutoring. You can also pay for Barton tutoring, or use an open-and-go home-based tutoring curriculum, such as Barton (slightly more training required), All About Reading/All About Spelling, or Logic of English, all of which are OG-based. The least expensive options are AAR/AAS and LoE, with AAR having the edge in its terminal level of instruction (seven levels, ending at high school reading level, vs LoE ending at the intermediate grades), and in decoupling reading and spelling, and LoE having the edge in total package price (and being an all-in-one language arts curriculum--whether this is a pro or con depends on whether reading, spelling, and writing are all at the same level in this particular student).

Critical to the success of any of these programs for a child with yours' profile is repetition and review, as she appears to have some phonics skills, but lacks automaticity applying them, which means that she is likely using a great deal of cognition on the act of decoding, rather than comprehension. If automaticity is an issue, she will probably need many more repetitions to attain fluency than most other children of her age and ability.

I was afraid that may be the case so I am glad you you have the resources. If you didn't you would have to wait until she couldn't compensate any more which seems unecessarily cruel.

I am curious how these interventions are done. I was a reading tutor for a year and they had a very specific protocol for what they wanted me (and other tutors) to do. There was some phonics training for younger kids in K-1st grade but with 2nd/3rd it was mostly having them read portions of passages and correct them when they made a mistake (or tell them the word if they didn't know) and then have them start the sentence over. Repeat over and over until the student was reading the passage fairly fluently with very few mistakes. They also had "duet reading" where I read one word, student read the next, etc, and eventually the kid read the whole thing on their own. But I wasn't teaching them phonics. The younger kids had specific interventions to learn letters and letter sounds and how to do simple blending to read nonsense words, but once a kid was in the 1st grade, that pretty much stopped. I am pretty sure that I had some older kids in 2nd-3rd grade with dyslexia or something similar. They just never seemed to improve much and while they might have become fluent with one passage it didn't necessarily transfer to other reading.

i remember one third grade girl who had trouble reading basic nonsense words like bab or cox, or whatever. She was not fluent with them and made a lot of errors. (and no, the school would not evaluate her even though I kept nagging, because she was meeting the minimum cutoffs in terms of overall fluency on CBM type fluency passages--probably because she was gifted).

blackcat, it sounds like the kind of reading tutoring that you were doing was primarily focused on increasing fluency, rather than decoding skills.

Neither phonological processing nor phonics development stops in the first grade. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for group interventions to stop at that point. Decoding interventions break down the basic phonemes of the language, and the basic graphemes. Some programs teach them in order of frequency, while others attempt to group them conceptually. All of the OG-based systems use explicit, incremental, multisensory instruction in phonological awareness and phonics, and repetition. They should be individualized (though some schools run interventions as small group, which limits individualization).

After all of the phoneme-grapheme pairings are mastered, if a student is still laboring, then one can embark on fluency exercises, such as those you described.

And they don't even have to be gifted to get passed over for evaluation. I've identified high school students with severe deficits in word-level decoding (aka, dyslexia) in the context of average intelligence, with no known history of formal educational supports.

The tutor she's seeing (or at least, the head of the tutoring center, with whom she spends some time -- there are lots of sub-tutors, too) is trained in Slingerland, which is an O-G method. The head tutor told me a few visits ago "her reading is so good, we're going to focus on writing for a while". It seems like what [Twin B] is generally doing in a session is reading a passage and writing in response to it. She got lots of praise last time for hard work and for correctly spelling "momentum" on the first try, which the tutor said showed she was thinking about the sounds and listening to them in her head. This doesn't sound like the kind of focused, repeated phonemic work you're talking about.

Do you know how bright kids respond to the heavy repetition to build automaticity? Everything you say makes sense, but I kind of imagine her rebelling if she were asked to do that. (She's got a short fuse, another thing we're working on right now.)