147 General discussion 6 Third, although the present dissertation did address individual differences in cognition, the literate home environment of children was not taken into account. The home literacy environment could have influenced reading and spelling development in general but also during the intervention as home exercises that need tutoring by parents were part of the intervention. The home literacy environment can provide children and their parents with certain skills, abilities, dispositions, and resources that provide the opportunity to learn and is related to reading-related abilities (e.g., Burgess et al., 2002) and semantic development (Mol et al., 2008). Therefore, we recommend future research to include home literacy environment as a control variable in response to intervention studies to find out what the effect of home literacy environment is on reading and spelling in general but also on response to intervention. As Sénéchal and Young (2008) found that parental involvement can have positive effects on the child’s reading acquisition and that training is a very important aspect, we expect that without parental training the effects of the home literacy environment will be closely related to socio-economic status of the parents. Clinical implications Implications for clinical and educational practice emerge from the findings in this dissertation. First, our findings emphasise the positive impact of a deep and broad semantic network for reading and spelling. This highlights the need to includemeasures of (deep and broad) semantic abilities in the assessment of children with dyslexia. Welldeveloped semantic representations could be seen as a protective factor, whereas poor developed semantic representations could be seen as a risk factor for further literacy development. Including these additional measures to gain insight in the compensatory sources of children with dyslexia is in line with the idea that learning to read and spell is caused by a combination and/or interaction between multiple factors (e.g., Catts et al., 2007) and the idea that both strengths and weaknesses are necessary in order to tailor the intervention to the child’s needs. In January 2022 the renewed Dutch protocol for assessment and intervention (Tijms et al., 2021) was implemented. The new protocol concludes that focusing on a limited set of typical (neuro)cognitive processes, as was the case in the protocol by Blomert (2006), does not do justice to the heterogeneity of dyslexia. Therefore, this renewed protocol gives educational psychologists the opportunity to include measures of both relative strengths and weaknesses and use the outcomes from these measures to tailor the intervention to the child’s needs. When extensive semantic representations are present these could be used to facilitate the spelling development, which could indirectly facilitate reading development. Second, we recommend educational psychologists to consider a phonics through spelling intervention for children with dyslexia. Although more research is necessary
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