If you remember we have seen the early signs of dyslexia, the early indicators of dyslexia, and I insisted on the fact that you should never consider these signs or symptoms in isolation. Remember I used three words: it is the combination of several symptoms, their frequency despite your correction and especially their persistence over time which would alert you. Now you might be in a situation where you have a child in front of you and you are not sure whether that child is dyslexic or not. With regard to the production, the spelling, the writing, the reading, you are hesitant. So we have compiled a series of informal tests to do a first level assessment. Let me insist on one thing: (it) is not the purpose of this, is not at all to DIAGNOSE the child - it's not your job; it's the job of the specialists. It is just for you to confirm or (otherwise) your suspicion of dyslexia for a particular child. Now there are several domains which you can explore with a child in order to confirm your hypothesis about dyslexia or otherwise. So the first one and perhaps the most important one is examining phonological awareness in the child. If you remember the dyslexic children have a core phonological deficit. Most of them, about 70% of the dyslexic children, have difficulties, manipulating the sounds of the language, because of the specific properties of speech and because they have difficulties representing the phonemes and the other phonological units you need in the brain. Now usually we distinguish between eight tasks, which are presented here in order of increasing complexity. You need to keep in mind that two things will determine the complexity of a task. One is the phonological unit you're working on. Syllables are easier than onset/rimes, which are easer than phonemes. And the second thing is the complexity of the task in terms of demand on manipulation, retention of the information, etcetera. When you are working with phonological units and especially with phonemes, please make sure that you pronounce pure sounds. In other words, the consonants, for example, should not be followed by a vowel, however faint. Let me give you an example. The phoneme corresponding to the letter 'T' is 't' and not 'tuh', 'tuh' being a syllable. As I said, there are eight tasks, usually which are designed to train phonological awareness, the first one is ... GENERATION. In this activity, the child is asked to generate words containing the same ending, the same final syllable, or rime as a target word. Example, with a syllable: 'Can you give me a word starting with pie, as in pilot?' An answer could be 'pirate', 'pineapple', would rime as you see in the film. You may tell me a word ending like in 'blap' or several words. This is the easiest task. The second task you can use is DETECTION. Here, it is more complicated because you give three words to the child and the child has to retain the three words in memory and to find the odd one out. For example, you can say, 'which word does not start the same way as the two others, 'market', 'margin', 'viscount'. The answer is 'viscount'. Another example with the rime, 'which word does not end in the same way as the two others? 'mill', 'kill', or 'son'? The answer is ... 'son'. With the onset, 'which word does not have the same beginning as the two others? 'stop', 'flag', 'flop'? The answer is 'stop'. An example with phonemes. 'Please tell me which word is different at the very beginning? 'crab', 'crane', 'frog'. The answer is 'frog'. The third task you may use with the children is BLENDING. In this task, you are asking the child to put linguistic units together. Again, I'm going to give you a few examples with syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme. Syllable: 'please tell me the whole world when you join together 'tay lay vi shion'. The answer is 'television'. Onset rime: 'what do you get when you join up 'tr' and 'app'?' 'Trap'. Phoneme: 'What do you get when you join up the sounds 'k, a, n, a, l'?' 'canal'. The next task, the fourth task which you can use is SEGMENTATION, and it is complementary to blending, it is actually the opposite. In this game, In this situation, you provide the child with a full word and you ask the child to divide the word into syllables, onset/rimes or phonemes. In the next task, the DELETION task, which is still more difficult than all the previous ones, because here the child really has to manipulate the phonemes. You asked a child to delete a linguistic unit and to say what remains in the word. For example, with a syllable, 'please say 'cabin', now say it again without 'k'. What remains?' 'bin'. With the phoneme: 'please say 'meat', now say it again without the 'm'. What remains?' 'eat'. The sixth task, which is even more complicated than the previous one, is SUBSTITUTION. The child is required here to substitute, one linguistic unit for another. Let me give you two examples, with the onset: 'listen to this, 'track'. Now what would happen to 'track' if I replace 'tr' with 'cr'?' The word is 'crack'. With the phoneme: 'listen to the following, 'pat'. What happens to 'pat' if I replace 'p' with 'b'?' (It) is going to give the word 'bat'. The seventh task is phoneme FUSION. The learner here is asked to put together the two first phonemes of two successive words. For example, if you give the two words sbig apples, the child needs to isolate the first phoneme of each word and put them together. The first phoneme of 'big' is 'b' and of apple 'a', so the answer is 'ba'. And the most difficult task is phoneme INVERSION. This is really, really complex. And you can do this task even with teenagers or with adults. It consists in inverting consonants within a word, a vowel within a word, or inverting the first, say the first phonemes of two successive words. Let me give you some examples. If you ask the person, the child, to invert the first two consonants of 'alligator', what are you going to obtain? 'agillator'. You can ask to invert that last two consonants of the word, like 'television', which will elicit the answer, 'telesivion'. You see it's not easy even for adults. Or you ask to invert the first phonemes of two successive words, like 'big car', which is going to give 'kick bar'.
