Another domain which you can assess quite easily in a child if you have a doubt about a possibility of dyslexia, Is the ... ... the sequencing abilities. You know from the definition, if you remember, that children with dyslexia often have a lot of difficulties memorizing and retrieving arbitrary sequences like the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week, the months of the year, the multiplication tables, which remain a real nightmare for them and perhaps some phone numbers they should know. You can draw up a little questionnaire and, depending on the age and the ability of the children, of the child, you are going to ask for the months, for the days, for the alphabet. For the older children you can ask more difficult questions, for example, what letter comes before P? What letter comes after C? Same thing for the days of the week. What comes before Sunday? Same thing for the months of the year. And you will notice that dyslexic children will have lots of difficulties compared to non-dyslexics in reciting those arbitrary sequences. You can also assess other domains in which dyslexic learners will show difficulties which are not directly reading, spelling, comprehension, but which are related to reading and spelling ability, especially rapid automatized naming and short-term memory. Let's start with rapid automatized naming. It is a test consisting in providing an A4 sheet with four pictures, or colors, or digits which you mix up several times randomly. And the child's task is to name as quickly as possible, and without mistakes, all the items on the page, and you time the child. Now 30 years of research have shown that dyslexic in this task of rapid automatized naming are much slower compared to non dyslexic children. And the difference is really big: two and a half (times). So the dyslexic children will be two and a half times slower compared to non-dyslexics. Now if I may say a few personal things about this test, it's really a test I really like because, first of all, it doesn't imply reading and spelling, so you can administer it already before grade one. Secondly, it doesn't involve reading and spelling, so you don't put the learner in another situation of failure and difficulty. And thirdly, this test is quite fun, and the dyslexic child will not realize he or she is so slow at doing the test. Now let's move on to visual short-term memory. When you have a few tests in the results section, you can use a copying test. Let's take a passage, a test which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and you put the children under pressure. You say that they need to copy the test as quickly as possible, and they need to have finished in two minutes, for example. You're going to see that due to stress, dyslexic learners are going to show, are going to make mistakes like addition, omission, inversion, etc. Another test which you can use is finding shapes among distractors. And we have selected for you the 'Bell' test The child has to cross (out) all the bells in a sheet where the bells are mixed up with other elements like horses, etc., etc. You can look at two things. One is how many bells the child is going to cross (out), and the second thing is what strategy is she going to use? And that's very interesting because usually, non-dyslexic children will go from left to right and from top to bottom more or less whereas dyslexic children will use (a) more erratic strategy, going up to down and left to right, right to left, etc,cetera. A final test you can use to examine visual short-term memory or visual attentional abilities is sequence comparison. You give a series of two or three or four letters. You have two series. And the child needs to compare them and to say whether they are the same or not. ... ... ... ... ... ... although non-dyslexic children do not make any errors in this test, dyslexic children will probably make some errors when you present them tricky sequences like C in one of the two series and O in the other. In summary, there are many informal tests you can use to assess a child. If you have a suspicion that he or she may be dyslexic or not. Again, let me stress that this is nothing to do with diagnosis. It is a basis on which you can use when you discuss with the parents for example. If you have some concern, you can show the results of the tests. Also you don't have to use this test if you are sure that the child has dyslexia and you don't have to use them all. You can pick one or the other tests with which you are more comfortable and ignore the others. Now let me give you two examples of what you can do with the results (of these test). For example, suppose that you have found out that the child has difficulties with phonic awarness and that she is weak in reading words. What does that tell you? That the phonological decoding route is weak so you will design a program aiming at enhancing phonic awareness and the phonological decoding route. Now, imagine the opposite scenario, so to speak. The child has much greater difficulties in reading irregular words compared to regular words and pseudowords and seemed to have a much better short-term memory for visual than for auditory materials. You will then get much better results in trying to develop the direct access system and the building of orthographic representations by teaching irregular words, for example, with flash cards, which and you will have noticed that the child has a strong, short, and visual memory so the use of flashcards will be, will ease, the memorization of these irregular words by the child. However, if you see for example that a child has a stronger say auditory memory or visual memory this doesn't mean that the other type of short-term memory should not be worked on. This is only to make a start by using the child's learning strengths in order to improve areas in which she has weaknesses.
