Reading Therapist

This programme qualifies trainees who have met all requirements of the International Association of Counselors & Therapists (IACT) for admission as licensed reading therapists. A reading therapist is trained to understand literacy and language difficulties, disabilities, and disorders faced by children, and their varied challenges in reading, comprehension, writing, and spelling. These processes encompass phonological (letters, words, and sentences), morphological (phrases, clauses, and sentences), semantic (affixes, root words, and discourse), and syntactic (grammar, text types, and genres) processing and skills. Trainees will also gain hands-on experience using a range of tools and protocols for screening, informal and standardised assessment, evaluation, and profiling of children with language difficulties, alongside intervention planning and procedures.

This programme equips trainees with specialised expertise to address profound literacy challenges in school-age students arising from developmental, cognitive, and neurological differences. By blending current literacy science with practical skills, graduates emerge as licensed 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, enabling them to make a meaningful impact on students who often fall through the gaps of standard education systems.

The programme provides comprehensive training to support diverse school-age students with developmental language delays affecting speech, comprehension, and expression. Trainees will gain practical competencies for working with multilingual individuals with complex literacy needs and those requiring augmentative communication. They will develop clinical reasoning skills to interpret student profiles, identify processing weaknesses, and design targeted interventions that foster genuine progress. Trainees will also become proficient in 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 and miscue analysis.

IACT is the largest and most prestigious professional body of its kind, based in the USA, admitting individuals who have fulfilled the rigorous requirements of its practising licence programmes as licensed counsellors or therapists. Membership is a mark of high standards and excellence. Practising members are clinically knowledgeable, bound by high ethical standards, and widely respected. They are eligible to practise in many countries across North America, Asia, Europe, and beyond.

IACT’s practising licence comprises three tiers: Credentialed, Registered, and Board-Certified, with Board-Certified being the highest status. As required by IACT, all coursework, assignments, and essays must be supervised and verified by an IACT-approved instructor and submitted to IACT’s Assessment Board in the USA for final assessment.

Merlion Academy is authorised to supervise and verify trainees’ work in support of their IACT membership applications, with additional support provided by the IACT Singapore and Malaysia chapters. Upon completing the programme and fulfilling the Credentialed tier requirements, trainees are eligible for full membership with the Literacy and Reading Therapies Association Singapore.

Admissions are conducted on a rolling basis and may commence at any time.

IACT-qualified reading therapists who wish to practise as special needs educational therapists are required to complete two additional top-up modules.