Early identification of dyslexia is essential to providing children with the necessary services and support to succeed academically. Current dyslexia screening measures are not widely available for English-speaking monolingual children and those available for bilingual children are not widely used. To contribute to the effort to provide widely available screening for six-year-old English speaking and bilingual children, the ASU Bilingual Language and Literacy Lab, the Child Language and Literacy Lab, Learning to Soar Tutoring, Healing Hearts Pediatrics, and the Phoenix Children’s hospital have collaborated to develop the Dyslexia Screening Questionnaire (DysQ) that is offered in both English and Spanish. The goal of this study (Phase I) was to test the readability and comprehensibility of the DySQ to help ensure that it is accessible to a wide population of English and Spanish-speaking parents. In the second phase of the study, we aim to validate the DySQ by comparing the DySQ results with gold-standard testing for diagnosing dyslexia. The ultimate goal is to implement the DySQ into pediatric settings so that English and Spanish-speaking children may be screened for dyslexia at their 6-year-old well-child check-up.
Six Spanish-English bilingual students, split into two groups of three, participated in twelve, 30-minute, small-group reading sessions. Students in Group 1 read approximately one year below grade level, and students in Group 2 read approximately a year and a half below grade level. In six of the twelve sessions, students read and discussed texts matched to their reading levels, and in the other six they read and discussed texts one year ahead of their reading levels. I assigned matched and difficult texts across the twelve days by blocked randomization.
I analyzed video transcripts of each session to understand students’ engagement (focus of engagement, strategies, and interaction) and discussion (inferential vs. literal responses, instances of verbal participation). At the end of each session, students reread and retold the book the group had read and discussed that day to produce a fluency (words correct per minute) and comprehension (ideas correctly retold) score.
Findings were complex and revealed that different levels of texts have both advantages and drawbacks. Key findings included: For fluency, half of the students benefited from matched texts. The other half read difficult texts with similar fluency to matched texts. For comprehension, text difficulty did not matter for anyone except one student, and for him it only had an effect on 3 of 12 days. Group 2 engaged much more with texts and ideas in difficult books and with pictures in matched books. Group 1 had more inferential/interpretive responses with matched texts, and Group 2 had more inferential and interpretive responses with difficult texts. Most students participated evenly regardless of the difficulty of the text under discussion. However, two students talked more when discussing matched texts.