Review of Assessment of learners with dyslexic-type difficulties.

Abstract

Reviews the book, Assessment of Learners with Dyslexic-Type Difficulties by Sylvia Phillips, Kathleen Kelly, and Liz Symes (2013). The author was delighted to receive and review this excellent book that will become one of my key texts on a variety of courses and has already found its place in our university library. It will be appreciated not only for its scholarly approach and accurate information but also for its clear and transparent writing style in a field where publications often seem either too simplistic or veiled in complex and unnecessarily impenetrable language. Apart from finding the book useful for my own professional practice as an assessor of students with literacy difficulties and or dyslexic type challenges, I will be recommending this book to my students from undergraduate level upwards, and in particular to students on my courses for specialist teachers and assessors in this field. It truly has something for everybody interested in this particular field of special educational needs (SEN), even if they do not aim to be teachers or assessors. Throughout the book, the academic referencing to a solid research base is excellent and makes it useful to anybody studying or writing about dyslexia and reading difficulties from undergraduate level upwards. Throughout this book, attention has been made to cover the needs of identifying particular literacy difficulties in children with English as an additional language. This is a particular strength of the volume for many practitioners who work in multicultural, and indeed multilingual, settings, and the assessment of all this growing cohort of learners for specific difficulties poses significant problems related to their additional needs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)