
I assessed her (the mum) this morning and came across some interesting things. Are these quite common in adult struggling readers?:
- poor phonics skills (blending particularly)
- poor alphabet code knowledge (especially vowel digraphs)
- word reading (via Burt Reading test) is worse on 'easier' short words than on longer, multi-syllable words. Her reading age came up as 10 years, 11 months and although her longer word reading was fairly accurate, it was slow and I'm not yet sure how well she understood them as she was working hard to sound them out.
I suspect that the complexity (1 sound=many spellings, 1 spelling=many sounds) of the alphabet code is leading to the inaccuracy of her short word reading, and that she may have a good sight memory and good guessing skills for the longer words (as well as some decoding ability).
I'd welcome any input on adult readers. I think I also need to look into vocabulary/comprehension tasks.
Thanks, Lucy