1. Is your child a poor reader? Maybe he or she just needs a memory upgrade Martin Beaudoin, Ph.D. University of Alberta Suzanne Sauvé, MSc-SLP, R. SLP(C)

2. Goals of the talk Summarize the demographics of French Schools of Alberta Dual-route model of reading Describe prereading skills Show examples of tests from the battery Demonstrate a demo of the web version Next steps…

3. A map of Canada…

4. Demographics of French schools in Alberta Alberta is 1.9% French-speakers, compared to 23% for Canada as a whole; all are bilinguals 35 French schools across the province 6 428 children registered in 2012-13 Large proportion of recent immigrants and refugees in some schools (up to 95%) These children arrive at any age and are integrated in schools by age, not educational background Imagine the language and ethnic soup!

5. Reading-aloud from a cognitive perspective Hillis, A.E. (2001). Cognitive Neuropsycholigical Approaches to Rehabilitation of Language Disorders: Introduction. In Chapey, R. Language Intervention Strategies in Aphasia and Related Neurogenic Communication Disorders. pp 513-523.

6. Prereading skills Many skills are involved in reading, depending on the type of reading The best known are phonological and phonemic awareness Lexical access and verbal memory are also fairly well known However, many others are important for some of the subtasks involved in reading Also, dyscalculia is closely related to most forms of dyslexia

7. General characteristics of test battery A ll responses by children are spoken (thus recorded) Only reading tests involve written words/nonwords Time is measured or limited in a number of tests Minimal visual distractors on screen Computer-testing limits error potential and allow schools to run the battery without a specialist Tests are marked by trained technician and reviewed by SLP with consideration of child history Entire test battery takes about 30-40 minutes

8. Basic reading tests (not actual order) Reading-aloud speed test (# words in 1 minute) Regular-words reading (lexical access) Irregular-words reading (lexical and non-lexical access) Nonword reading (lexical and non-lexical access) Syllable inversion (phonological awareness) Initial phoneme deletion (phonemic awareness)

9. Nonword reading

10. More specific tests Morpholexical decision (morpho. awareness) Sentence repetition (verbal memory and syntactic awareness) Immediate and delayed auditory recall (short- term verbal memory) Rapid-Access-Naming of animal (lexical access) Rapid-Access-Naming of letters (graphemic access)

11. RAN (animals)

13. Numeracy tests Rapid-Access-Naming of digits (numerical access and visual accuracy) Digit sequence repetition (verbal and numerical memory) Inverted digit sequence repetition (working verbal and numerical memory)

14. Demo of web version of battery Password protected site with registration: http://prereading.dlinkddns.com/login.jsp

15. Future steps… Norming (maybe Fall 2014) Translation to English and Spanish (2014-15) Automatic speech recognition (?)