The Literacy and Dyslexia Support Team work with pupils who have severe literacy difficulties and/or dyslexia, who require support over and above that available in school.
Literacy and Dyslexia Guidelines
We have developed literacy and dyslexia guidelines. Every school has a copy of these guidelines and whole school training has been provided.
We have literacy and dyslexia resources online to share, but schools must complete training first. Once training has been undertaken, schools will be invited to view the resources.
Intervention programmes
There are three main literacy intervention programmes running in the City of Edinburgh – Read Write Inc, Fresh Start and SRA.
Choosing books for a child
It is crucial that you provide children with reading materials at the correct level for their ability.
Our literacy and dyslexia guidelines contain the following information on how to identify the correct text level for a pupil.
Reading score (percentage) = 100 – ((E ÷ RW) x 100)
RW = running words (words read) and E = errors
Example: 150 words were read and 18 errors were made. So, the reading score is:
100 – ((18 ÷ 150) x 100) = 88%
There are three levels of text difficulty:
- Easy (95-100%) is possibly too easy for the reader but can be a suitable level for improving fluency and pace
- Instructional (90–94%) is a suitable level for extending skills
- Hard (less than 90%) is too difficult for the reader and will affect their understanding of text.
Easier strategy to work out text level
Get the pupil to read 100 words from the text. When the pupil reads the text, tally the words the pupil gets wrong.
- easy 95-100 words are read correctly
- instructional 90-94 words are read correctly
- hard 80-89 words are read correctly
To get a clearer picture, the pupil could read 200 words, then divide their incorrect response score by 2.
Writing the word they read wrongly above the word can provide more information about the reader’s difficulties.
