The term multisensory is often banded about and is sometimes misunderstood. We believe that Salley offers a multisensory approach because it uses activities that appeal to the different senses including kinaesthetic and proprioceptive which are less frequently addressed in programmes that are preventative rather than interventionist. Typically children who are dyslexic or who have had difficulty learning to read are introduced to multisensory approaches. This usually occurs however after a problem has been identified. In salley we believe in trying to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place. Thus the multisensory approaches are used with all children in the hope of addressing every child’s preferred learning style.

For example, the propriceptive sense is critical and often under used. In salley children are asked to carry out movement based tasks to help with sequencing. This means, that they use the position of their body in space to facilitate the development of auditory sequencing which can be a challenging area to develop.

The programme seems to use a number of words that don’t make sense – they are not proper words – surely this is confusing. It seems to me that it is like the old ITA system of teaching phonics that I had when I was at school.

Salley does use non words and real words in the programme. This is because by using non words it helps children to break down the word into its component parts without worrying about or being distracted by the meaning. Salley is not just about teaching phonics – it is teaching a much broader range of skills of which phonics is only one. Blending and segmenting non words helps children to reflect on the sound structure of the word, think about onset and rimes for example, at a different level of psycholinguistic processing. An excellent book to read is by Stackhouse and Wells (1996) published by Whurr if you want to find out more about the theory behind this.