Training and careers for reading intervention professionals?

[tutor]

Hello to forum users and to the people at the Yale center for dyslexia and creativity. I'm posting here because I'd like to find out how to have a career as a reading and dyslexia expert. If there were a profession called "reading therapy," similar to speech therapy, with a clear path of evidence-based education and certification, that is what I would want to do. If anyone on this forum has advice, I'd love to hear your ideas.

I am a graduate student in linguistics, looking for the next step toward a career in which I implement evidence-based interventions to help dyslexic children and adults learn to read accurately and fluently. I've been doing research on possible professional degrees or credentials that will give me both the training and the credibility for such work. It's very important to me to learn evidence-based approaches, and since such a vast number of different theories and commercial products and approaches exist, I want to be careful to get the right kind of training. In all my reading on the subject, I haven't gotten much insight into relevant career paths.

So far my best ideas are:

-getting a masters in SLP, but I am not sure how much that degree would focus on reading, and how much work there really is for SLPs who want to work with dyslexia. I've thought about getting the SLP Masters, then finding a way to get further training to become qualified to be a dyslexia specialist.

-getting an MA in Reading, which would qualify me to be a Reading Specialist in some public school systems. My hesitation is that I haven't been able to be sure that these programs teach science-based approaches to literacy, and how much I could work directly with students. (I am going to meet with a Reading Specialist soon to get more answers.)

-Being a kindergarten or first-grade teacher. But I think I would be happier working with children in smaller groups and specializing in reading, and also it seems that as a teacher, I would need to get lucky and find a school in which I was allowed to use the best evidence-based methods.

A little more about my interests and background:

Two areas that especially interest me are:

-encouraging phonemic awareness in preschool children through songs, poems, games, or any evidence-supported approach.

-finding out how to intervene with dyslexic adults who can read, but who would like to learn to read more fluently so they can pursue higher education. or simply satisfy their curiosity about the world.

-becoming trained in implementing the approaches, mentioned in Overcoming Dyslexia, that change the way the brain processes words.

I've read two great books about the latest research in dyslexia: Overcoming Dyslexia, by Yale's Sally Shaywitz, and Speech To Print, by Louisa Moats. I've also read other books and articles about literacy, taken one course in child literacy acquisition, and worked as a paid and volunteer reading tutor in various settings (including brief stints at a couple of quack private reading schools). I've also been trained in a whole language approach to tutoring adults in reading comprehension. And I've worked with children in other capacities too. So, I'm pretty well-informed about literacy and experienced enough to know that I am well suited to work with people in a helping capacity. I've been accepted to two Speech Language Pathology masters programs, and will probably start that next fall. But I am still very interested in finding out about all possible approaches to the kind of work I would like to do.

Thanks for any advice!

-Reading tutor & future professional