This programme aims to qualify any trainee who has passed all the programme’s requirements of the International Association of Counselors & Therapists (IACT) and be admitted as a licenced reading therapist. A reading therapist is expected to understand about literacy and language difficulties, disabilities and disorders faced by the children and their different challenges in reading, comprehension, writing and spelling processes. The processes include phonological (from letters and words to sentences), morphological (from phrases and clauses to sentences), semantic (from affixes and root words to discourse) and syntactic (grammar, text types and genres) processing and skills. The candidate will also be practising about the using different tools and protocols for screening, informal & standardised assessment, evaluation and profiling of children with language difficulties together with intervention planning and procedures.

This programme equips participants with specialised expertise to address profound literacy challenges in school-age students stemming from developmental, cognitive, and neurological differences. By blending cutting-edge literacy science with hands-on practical skills, graduates emerge as licenced professionals capable of delivering evidence-based screening, assessment and intervention strategies for reading and literacy disorders, including dyslexia, dysnomia, hyperlexia, cacographia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia and dysorthographia, that go beyond traditional instruction. This enables trainees to make a meaningful impact on students who often slip through the cracks of standard education systems.

The programme provides comprehensive training to support diverse school-aged students with developmental language delays affecting speech, comprehension, and expression. Participants will gain practical competencies for working with multilingual individuals with complex literacy needs and those requiring augmentative communication. Trainees will also master clinical reasoning to interpret student profiles, identify processing weaknesses, and design targeted interventions that foster genuine progress. Additionally, trainees will become confident using hands-on assessment tools such as the Ekwall-Shanker Reading Inventory, Bader Reading and Language Inventory, Neale Analysis of Reading, Renfrew Scales, and error-pattern & miscue analysis.

The IACT is a prestigious professional body based in the USA that admits any person who have fulfilled the rigorous requirements of the practising licence programmes to obtain practising membership as a counselor or a therapist. The membership with the IACT is a mark of high standard and excellence. Practising members are not only knowledgeable and bound by high ethical standards, but are also highly respected as well. They are eligible to work in many countries such as North American, Asian and European countries etc. 

The three tiers of the IACT’s practising licence are Credentialed, Registered, and Board-certified. Board-certified members hold the highest status of the membership of the IACT. 

As a requirement of the IACT, all courseworks, assignments and essays of a trainee must be supervised and verified by an approved instructor of the IACT. All works of the candidate are required to be submitted by the instructor to the IACT’s Assessment Board based in the USA for final assessment. 

Merlion Academy is authorised to supervise and verify the trainee’s work seeking to gain admission as an IACT member. Trainee will also be supported by the both the IACT Singapore and Malaysia chapters. Graduates could be admitted as an Allied Members of the Association of Educational Therapists (Singapore). 

Admissions for the programme are conducted on a rolling basis.

An IACT member who practises as a reading therapist and wish to practise as a special needs educational therapist will have to take two additional top-up modules.