OK, I don’t have cable and so I’m addicted to this website. One of the featured documentaries is something called The Dyslexia Myth. I don’t have dyslexia or know anyone that’s ever been diagnosed with it, but I thought, “What the hell” and watched it. If you’d rather watch it before posting to this thread, please feel free. It’s only an hour long.
It turned out to be fascinating. These are the points it makes:
Educators often encourage parents to get their otherwise bright youngsters with reading problems tested for dyslexia as early as possible, so that they can get special services and concessions, such as extra test-taking time, visual aides (like colored glasses), and permission to take notes with lap tops.
It is commonly believed that dyslexics see the printed word differently than everyone else. But numerous studies have shown that this isn’t true. For instance, “normal” kids and kids labeled with dyslexia were presented with Hebrew characters (which they had never been exposed to) and told to recreate them. Both characters performed similarly.
Is is also commonly believed that dyslexics have different reading problems than poor readers with lower intelligence. However, studies have shown that this too isn’t true either. Additionally (and more interesting) the documentary presented evidence that reading isn’t that difficult of a skill intellectually. Many children with below average intelligence can read very well. They may not understand what they’re reading, but simply “decoding” letters into words isn’t a major skill. So it shouldn’t be automatically assumed that a kid with slightly below average IQ will have reading difficulty…which is often presumed to be the case.
So it appears dyslexia is a term used to describle “children with no intellectual impairment who have reading problems”. We can see why parents would rush to get this label for their children, because it would remove the stigma of them being “slow” while also allowing them to gain the services of special education. Also, there’s a whole industry devoted to dyslexia and its special products. Parents will spend millions of dollars buying wacky services that have not been shown to work.
Because these services have not been shown to work, dyslexic children never learn to read very well, which just solidifies the perception of their disability.
Recent studies have shown that it has been a mistake to treat children diagnosed with dyslexia any differently than other kids with reading problems. Brain imaging and psychometric tests have determined that these children generally have the same exact problem–a problem with picking up certain sounds critical for “sounding out” words. It’s neurological misfunctioning that both groups of children have. If they have the same underlying problem, it is stupid not to help them in the same way.
Reading specialists in Cambridge, UK have determined how stupid this is by devising an intense program tailored not to “dyslexic” kids but to all kids with reading problems. It starts off by identifying kids with this neurological handicap in pre-school/kindegarten and pulling them out of class for 35-40 minutes every day to help them hear and replicate certain sounds. It almost looked more like speech therapy than reading help. As the kids get older, the special teachers focus on not only helping the kids become better readers, but to better appreciate reading. Because unfortunately, according to the researchers in this documentary, what happens is that many poor readers (regardless of early aptitude) have declines in their IQ as they grow older because they don’t read and therefore do not get stimulated in the same way as kids who are avid readers do. So a program that encourages reading among below-average readers would mitigate this.
This approach has received a lot of resistence by people who insist that dyslexia exists. But the documentary showed the success stories of the Cambridge approach.
Like all documentaries, it didn’t do a good job of showing the “other side” of the argument. Perhaps there is evidence that dyslexia exists, but the filmmakers purposefully didn’t seek out those researchers who have it. Perhaps the Cambridge approach isn’t the panacea it was made out to be. Also, there are a myriad of dyslexic adults. It would have made for a more balanced film if they were asked to give their point of view. But I thought the film did make some good points. If it is possible that all kids with reading problems have the same issue going on, it really doesn’t make sense to segregate them based on their intelligence…unless you just don’t want your kid rubbing shoulders with “dumb” kids or you want them to have special priviledges that cater to their disability rather than cure it. We need to reevaluate this tendency to diagnose everything and rather focus on the causes of problems so that effective treatment can be found.
Has anyone reading this been diagnosed with dyslexia? Are there any parents who have kids who have been diagnosed with dyslexia? If you’ve seen the documentary, how do you feel about it? Also, if you’re an educator, have you see evidence of the “dyslexia” myth?
My oldest daughter is dyslexic. I haven’t seen that particular documentary, but assuming that your eight listed points are a fair summary of its contents, the documentary is a pile of steaming crap.
Dyslexia exists. I’ve dealt with a crying six-year-old who can’t read “because the letters keep moving around”, not because she couldn’t replicate certain sounds.
Having said the above, I do agree that many children who have difficulty reading seem to be dumped into the “dyslexic” category when they shouldn’t be. I remember one teacher who told us that she had dealt with dozens of dyslexics but this one (our daughter) “really has all of the symptoms”.
Not to be argumentative (I have no dog in this fight at all), but do we know that “letters moving around” doesn’t happen to other people who are not dyslexic? Could it be the result of eye-straining while the brain tries to make sense of gobbledy-gook? Or is it really something specific to dyslexia? (I know when I look at a page of binary code, things start moving around too.)
But this is my own personal observation supporting the “dyslexia exists” position. I have always had a hard time remembering numbers. If you tell me you live on Route 308, I’ll tend to remember it as Route 380 or 306. 4’s and 7’s, 2’s and 5’s, and 0’s and 8’s are the same thing in my brain, seems like. I’m one of those people who cannot write down a phone number while someone is rattling off the numbers. I need a person to give me each number one at a time, and then afterwards I repeat each number out loud. I know they must think I’m an idiot, but I just can’t trust my brain not to twist and transpose.
This has been a life-long habit and it hasn’t been disabling in the least (more comical than anything else). But I have found that it gets worse when I’ve taken certain (prescribed) psychotropic drugs–particularly the ones that increase dopamine levels.
It may be that the “dyslexia is a myth” people are going to the other extreme–lumping everyone who can’t read well regardless of any idiosyncratic patterns to their problems. And I don’t know if I buy the whole “IQ declines when you don’t read” argument. There are many ways of stimulating the brain a part from reading. And many dyslexic adults do go on live to successful lives. The film made it sound like you become a mentally retarded adult if you have a reading problem in childhood.
I can personally vouch that dyslexia exists. It run in my family, and I struggled with reading because of it into first grade.
It wasn’t an intelligence issue, but it also wasn’t dyslexia alone. I have a very minor problem, coupled with a short attention span, together they made it almost impossible for me to learn how to “read” because I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t until I moved in with my father (a more attentive parent) and to a better school district that anyone noticed and took steps to train my how to read properly.
Although I still have problems with machine-type print (the small stuff next to bar codes), alphanumerical code (as in 8B44-AC35-etc, like found in product keys) and if I try to read too quickly. The text gets all mixed around.
It runs in my family too, my grandfather has a terrible time reading. I think I have it a little bit. Sometimes I’ll confuse left from right, p’s for d’s, ect. Sometimes too, I’ll go ro type a word, and instead write a word that of sounds like the word I want to use, but is a completely different word. another problem is leaving words out.
How could we know if “letters jumping around” does not happen to people who are not dyslexic? I think one of us non dyslexics would have mentioned the jumping. As John Mace points out, we even like to amuse ourselves by noting that actually moving letters has very little effect on our reading speed or comprehension.
Good question. The short answer is probably “we don’t”. A slightly longer answer might be that we’re looking at a smooth range of symptoms from “steady as a rock” to “flutters all over the place” and attempting to mark a magic spot on this range where we can say “yup, that one’s dyslexic”.
One of my daughter’s issues is that she simply could not handle those standardized tests where you fill in circles on a separate “bubble sheet”. She’d read the question, knew exactly what the answer was, then moved to the bubble sheet and couldn’t remember what circle she was supposed to be filling in. The solution: she got to circle the correct answer on the question sheet (thus ruining it for any future re-use) rather than use the bubble sheet and someone else (whom is presumably not dyslexic) later transferred those responses to a bubble sheet.
(She was also given extra time on tests because of her reading problem, but she absolutely refused to use it because doing so singled her out as having a problem. When the rest of the class turned in their tests, she’d turn hers in also, regardless of how far along she was at the time. She could be as stubborn as me when she wanted to.)
I think you misunderstand me. You’re saying that “letters moving around” is evidence of the realness of dyslexia–a disorder that is somehow different than just having poor reading ability. I’m asking if we took a “slow” person who has difficulty reading (not dyslexic) if the “letters move around” for them, would they say yes or no.
As I said, when I stare at a page full of gobbledy-gook (like binary code or ancient Sanskrit, or whatever), the letters also move around. I don’t know if they move around in the same way that your daughter says they do for her, but they aren’t “stationary” like language that makes sense to me is. But I’m not dyslexic and have never had a problem reading English. So I’m wondering if “letters moving around” is a strong definitive criterion for anything.
And for everyone who keeps mentioning genetics and family history of reading problems, this isn’t evidence of dyslexia either. It’s evidence that your family has a history of reading problems. The documentary did not say that there was no biological basis for reading problems–just that we have artificially created a disorder called “dyslexia” based on the intelligence of the person that has it. If they are smart but can’t read, we say they are dyslexic. If they are slow and can’t read, we say they just can’t read well. The documentary makes the case that both groups are suffering from the same disorder and should be treated the same way.
My grade in high school included a guy who was dyslexic and ended up being the class valdedictorian or salutatorian, I forget which. I had a British literature class with him, in which one of the assignments was to memorize and write out in class the introduction to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in Middle English. Spelling counted. Needless to say, it was a tough assignment in general to memorize that weird spelling, but he failed miserably. He’d undergone a lot of specialized training and was quite good at reading and memorizing passages normally (the British lit class was an elective course that generally smarter students who loved reading would take) but that particular assignment really screwed with him. The rest of the Tales we read in a modern translation and it wasn’t a problem for him.
I don’t think you can chalk that up to “he was a slow learner”/“he was a special ed student.”
I was under the impression dyslexia isn’t related to intelligence at all, but to communication abilities. Do people really believe “slow” people can’t get dyslexia?
Really? I just stared at a page of Sanskrit for a while, and nothing moved around for me.
My father and sister are dyslexic. My father is very bright, my sister is a bit above average intelligence. She struggled very much all through school, and my mom had to read all her homework assignments to her at night. I probably shouldn’t comment without having seen the documentary, but dyslexia being a myth seems pretty implausible to me.
Good idea. So far, staring at texts I cannot read does not result in jumping units of text. I can’t remember them well, but I have no meanings to attach to them. Reports of jumping letters sounds like an indication of an error happening in an associative area. Do dyslexics see jumping when they look at texts in languages they can’t read ? If they don’t it might mean they trouble is turning the vision into language.
At this point, I’m pleading with people to at least watch a few minutes of the documentary because I don’t think people are following the thrust of the argument.
The anti-dyslexic researchers aren’t saying that “dyslexics” are slow learners or mentally disabled.
They are arguing that we have designated a category for them–with associated criteria and assumptions–that not only don’t jibe with empirical findings, but could be making problems worse–that is, by accomodating kids instead of effectively teaching them.
To make an analogy, it’s like saying that a person who stutters but has no other pathology has “dysfluency”, but a person who stutters and is also developmentally disabled is just…well, that’s just how it is for people like them. But stuttering is totally independent of intelligence and cognition. So regardless of intelligence level, stutterer A should not be given a different label from stutterer B.
By giving someone an unnecessary label, you separate them out as being somehow different–needing different kinds of coaching and techniques and accomodations. What the researchers found was that if you treat reading problems as reading problems, instead of parsing the reading problems out based on unrelated variables (such as IQ), then you are able to devise a system that treats all people with reading problems. Because you’ve identified the thing they all share in common. A specific neurological trait.
Mind you, I’m not sold all the way on their argument (no condition ever boils down to one specific explanation…it’s oversimplication only in the other direction). I just feel like I need to clarify it a bit before people bash it.
This seems to be a common pattern. 30 years ago everyone had hypoglycemia, then everyone had candida infections, now it seems everyone is allergic to gluten. All of those are serious problems that affect a large number of people, but they were also fad diagnoses that people used to explain a host of other problems.
I am pretty sure there are dyslexics that have unique problems, just as there are kids who really do have Aspergers or autism. But there is also a huge problem with over diagnosing.
I haven’t watched the documentary, and not knowing much about dyslexia I cannot respond to most of the points made in the OP, but this one jumped to me.
If I am exposed to a glyph coming from an alphabet I am not familiar with, I will see it as a graphic rather than as a letter, and it seems likely to me that my brain will process it very differently. I’m quite sure that it’d be possible to find studies showing that reproducing letters from an unknown alphabet makes use of very different parts of the brain than writing symbols from a known alphabet (even if they form nonsense strings of characters). So this doesn’t seem like evidence against dyslexia to me.
Interesting question. I’m wondering if dyslexia is recognized as a problem for readers of languages like Arabic or Chinese.
I admit I haven’t watched the video but my understanding is that dyslexia is one of many, many glitches that can make reading hard for people. Can your eye track the letters? Can you take in the letters in chunks? Can you use context clues? Can you generalize phonetic rules? Can you memorize spelling exceptions? Can you process sequentially? Do you have a large vocabulary? Is your attention span sufficient? Are you impulsive, so you read the first letter and guess what the word will be? Do you go back and reread if it didn’t make sense? I’m sure some of these correlate to children with lower intelligence, but some don’t and probably all can be found in bright children who aren’t motivated or who haven’t been exposed to lots of books in the home.
I think all of these different issues would be best worked on by identifying them and teaching the kid specific strategies, whatever their intelligence level.
