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The purpose of the assessment is to identify those who do not achieve

average performance and to determinate the nature of their difficulties in order to structure a plan for intervention or training in compensation strategies. Assessing reading and writing difficulties in young people implies the evaluation of different abilities from intelligence and cognitive abilities to spatial orientation and work organization, apart from those directly related to literacy or language use. As was noted earlier in this chapter, given that cognitive and linguistic abilities progress in parallel, developmental dyslexics ordinarily show a wide range of difficulties. Some of them are secondary deficits, however many others form a group of symptoms that constitute the core of the dyslexic’s disability. The tests selection tests can be used to detect the nature and magnitude of the problem, and to reject alternative

explanations such as low intelligence, perceptual of psychological

disturbances, etc. In the following section, the most frequently used tests are described, giving special attention to those specifically designed assessments of reading and writing disabilities.

5.1. Intelligence Scales:

In Spain, the evaluation of intelligence is still required to get a diagnosis of learning difficulties. Intelligence scales allow assessing patient’s performance in non linguistic areas which is necessary to reject mental retardation as the origin of the student’s difficulties. As these scales are well known, we are going to give a short description.

Weschler Scales:

These scales provide a measure of the global intellectual capacity, as well as allowing discrimination between verbal and manipulative abilities. This

provides important information to diagnose dyslexics and people with learning disabilities. The tests also allow analysing several cognitive abilities as

memory, sequencing, etc. Raven Progressive Matrix.

This test evaluates non-verbal reasoning. It includes a special scale for children, a general one for children, adolescents, and adults; and a third one for adults with a high socio-economic status. Its utility derives from the possibility of being applied to people with low socio-economic status or any linguistic difficulties.

5.2. Specific tests for the assessment of reading and writing.

A number of tests and scales have been specifically designed to evaluate reading and writing abilities. These tests include tasks to assess specific aspects of cognitive functioning. In such a way, the professional could select the most adequate pattern of evaluation for a particular individual. We will

a. Test de Análisis de la Lectura y la Escritura (TALE) (Test for the Analysis of Reading and Writing) (Toro & Cervera, 1980).

This test provides a tool to evaluate the level of acquisition of different reading and writing skills of 6 to 10 year-old children. It includes a wide range of tasks that evaluate from the simplest abilities, as letter or syllable reading, to the most complex ones, as text writing and comprehension.

The test is divided into two parts: reading and writing. The reading part consists of 5 subtests: letter reading, syllable reading; words reading; text reading, and text comprehension. For text reading and comprehension, different selections are provided to be selected as function of the child’s school level. The writing part includes 3 subtests: copying; dictation; and spontaneous writing.

Through the analysis of the responses, the practitioner could obtain a clear picture of the child’s reading and writing abilities and identify the kind of

“anomalies” that characterize his/her performance. The objective of evaluation is not only to understand the child’s level, but also his/her reading fluency and intonation; the kind of reading and writing errors, the quality of writing, etc. Specifically, this information would be essential to design a program for intervention.

In spite of its utility, the problem of TALE is that its administration takes a long time and it could be tedious, mainly by those children who have difficulty with reading or writing tasks.

A new version appeared called Escalas Magallanes de Lectura y Escritura (EMLE-TALE 2000) (Magallanes Scale for Reading and Writing) by García & Urío (2002).

This version presents some interesting innovations. First, the age of application has been widened to 15 years. It also includes a computerized form for the report of results. Finally, the subtests have been reduced to five: Reading aloud, Letter identification, Text copy, Dictation, and Reading

comprehension. With the exception of the reading task, the test permits a group application that lasts a mean of 1 hour and 30 minutes. Following the same approach as TALE, the level achieved (in numeric terms) as well as the quality of performance, evaluated.

b. The Cognitive Approach

Under the cognitive approach, the linguistic system is conceived as a structure composed by subcomponents that work with a relative

independence. The function of each component proceeds through different operations, and processes different pieces of information. From this

perspective, the system is characterized by the specialization of its

process is causing the symptoms (Sánchez Bernardos, 1992; Cuetos, 1999; Ostrosky, Ardila & Rosselli, 1999; Roch-Lecours, Dieguez, Boehm, Tainturier, Gold & Peña, 1999).

The tests constructed under this frame include tasks that allow discriminating not only the strategies used by the subject to obtain the response, but also the missing mechanisms or those with a wrong functioning.

Evaluación de los Procesos Lectores - PROLEC I y II (Reading processes evaluation) (Cuetos, Rodríguez y Ruano, 1996).

This is a test for individual administration. The PROLEC I is addressed to children from 1st to 4th course of the primary education (6-9/10 years). PROLEC II evaluates children in the 5th and 6th, even older. However it is a useful tool to evaluate older subjects with reading disabilities. The test

contains four groups of tasks: letter identification, lexical processing, syntactic processing, and semantic processing. The most interesting tasks are letters and words reading because they allow to the determinant of the kind of mechanisms involved in the child’s difficulty.

The core of the test is constituted by 6 tasks addressed to the assessment of lexical processing: two letter identification tasks; a Lexical decision task; a task of Word, and other of Pseudoword reading, a task of Word and Pseudoword reading. There are also additional task of semantic, syntactic and text processing.

The advantage of this test lies in that it indicates the most efficient route by computing the errors in reading words and pseudowords, and it includes some concrete suggestions for intervention based on the deficits found. c. Tests for the assessment of Linguistic Abilities caused by neurological damage.

There are some tests that are not specifically designed for the evaluation of reading and writing, but we include these type of tasks because their objective is to evaluate the preserved and lost abilities of patients with the certainty or suspicion of a neurological disorder. There are several reasons for use of these tests. One is that they cover a wider age range (they could be applied to adults). Anther is the possibility to assess other aspects that could interact with language abilities. In other cases, the objective of the practitioner is to reject, or confirm, the neurological origin of the patient symptoms. The practitioner selects the subtests that are better adapted to the objective in a specific assessment context.

Programa Integrado de Exploración Neuropsicológica. Test Barcelona. (Integrated Program for the Neuropshychological Exploration) J. Peña Casanova. (1990).

This is a test well known in medical environments and which is frequently used because of it wide scope. It is thought to be used with adult patients but it is also suitable to be administered to children older than ten years. It

contains forty-two subtests out of which eleven are focussed on oral language, and three on written language. The analysis of the patient’s responses

provides an overview of his/her linguistic abilities, and it allows knowing if there are any other (neurological) alterations. The problem is that the practitioner needs some training to become familiar with the test, and to be able to capture all the information it provides.

Evaluación del Procesamiento Lingüístico en la Afasia (EPLA). Spanish Version of PALPA. J. Kay, R. Less; M. Colthert; F. Valle & F. Cuetos (2000). This is a very complete text that assesses text comprehension. The objective of the authors was to produce a tool for the independent assessment of the many different abilities involved in language comprehension and production. Their intention was to detect what specific processes work properly and which ones could be causing the symptoms. The test contains 58 different subtests. Obviously, it is not constructed to administrate all of them to the same patient. On the contrary, the idea is to follow a research like strategy, as it is usual in many diagnosis processes, proving the patient’s performance in some tasks to accept or reject the professional’s hypotheses about the nature of the problem shown by the patient.

In every subtest, there is a description of the task, suggestions of tentative explanations of the patient’s performance and an orientation about how to proceed next in order to check hypothetical diagnosis. For instance, if the patient fails in the visual pseudowords lexical decision, the manual suggest letter processing and word reading. If the patient finds no problems to answer, it is advisable to go further in the exploration of lexical processing by the administration of other lexical decision subtests.

The main problem with this test is that the practitioner should be familiar with the cognitive approach, and need some practice to handle it with ease. Nevertheless, the instructions are so clear that a novice could manage planning the sessions in advance.

Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. Spanish Adaptation García Albea, J. E.; Sánchez Bernardos, M.L. & del Viso, S. (1986).

This is an instrument to assess the performance in different linguistic tasks, and provides a profile that classifies the patient according to the perspective of the classical neuropsychology. It assess 34 verbal and 10 non verbal

variables. The special interesting are the subtests addressed to the evaluation or writing language: word reading, sentence reading, paragraph reading, letters and written word discrimination, and tasks of copying, dictation, and composition. As the tasks are independent, it is possible to administer the most specifically related to the patient difficulties.

6. Technological, financial support and other type of actions.