Challenges with listening skills/processing sound information  

CTOPP-2 is a norm-referenced test that measures phonological processing skills related to reading. Many of the subtests can provide insight information to how a child is processing the sounds and if such difficulties are related to their listening abilities. 

Strength:

• Helps identify students with phonological processing difficulties who might possibly experience difficulties with reading later on in their development.

• Also helps identify students whose phonological skills are significantly below their peers. 

• It has 12 subtests that assess a wide range of areas such as: 

  • sound matching

  • phoneme isolation

  • blending nonwords

  • segmenting nonwords, etc.   

Weakness:

• Many of the subtests might be compromised with tasks that might be unfamiliar to both the examiner and examinee. 

Strength:

• Can start off treatment in a quiet space and then slowly build to a noisier environment to model more of the child's natural surroundings.

• Treatment starts off with discriminating between similar sounds others produce and later can expand to producing those sounds and self-regulation.

Weakness:

• This approach may lack naturalness, as children are asked to engage in direct therapy methods with repetitions and much practice

Strength:

• Many methods that can be used to facilitate this technique like:

  • Rhyming

  • Sound segments

  • Repetition

  • Blending

• Helps develop letter-sound correspondence, which in turn can help develop better reading skills.

Weakness:

• Speech and reading abilities may improve, but late intervention may hinder the rate of improvement. The earlier a child starts therapy, the better, and preferably before reading education starts in the general education classrooms.