I am dyslexic. I grew up before it was a recognized condition or diagnosed.
I am above average in intelligence and I love to read. I am a very good reader and when I have spare time I plow though books.
However I have a few issues with reading and writing that most people don’t.
When I was learning my alphabet some letters gave me trouble.
[ul]
[li]Are M and N really different letters? I had a hard time telling[/li][li]Sometimes an M had three humps when I wrote it, [/li][li]My Ns sometimes had 2[/li][li]Does the diagonal in a N go \ this way? Or does it go / that way? I wrote them both ways[/li][li]Ditto for Z /? or ?[/li][li]D and P I recall figuring out fairly quickly[/li][/ul]
My mother had been a high school English teacher before I was born, and I was brought up in a home that loved reading, and I was taught to read when I young. So I think we can rule out a late start with reading.
I have outgrown most of my dyslexic issues with the exception of I’m still not a great speller, and this one other problem that has bugged me all of my life. Sometimes if I glance at something and don’t concentrate my mind will twist the letters around, or sometimes add a letter or two causing no end to confusion. Once the confused word is perceived by my mind I have a devil of a time unscrambling it. Sometimes I have to stop and spell it in my mind one letter at a time.
Some examples would be a Newspaper headline that I glance at:
“County imposes a new tax” Would get read as Country imposes a new tax. Country imposing a new tax?
Through and Thought are also favorites of mine to mix up.
For me it’s not so much letters moving around as whole words skipping from one line to another. So in a block of text like this:
Some examples would be a Newspaper headline that I glance at:
“County imposes a new tax” Would get read as Country imposes a new tax. Country imposing a new tax?
Through and Thought are also favorites of mine to mix up.
I might read the first line like this:
Some examples would be a new tax also newspaper headline mix up
I took a speed reading course that helped a lot (anyone remember Evelyn Wood?) so I tend to read the whole line of text as a unit, and I am a fast reader in general. Reading comprehension is great if it’s interesting material, but I may have to read a section over if it’s a boring text or the content isn’t familiar to me. My spelling skills have always been good, and I learned to read using phonics just like all the other kinders.
I do think part of the appeal to parents of getting their kid tagged as dyslexic these days is well, hey, free services and extra individual attention and support, why not? Private instruction at public school prices.
I would suggest that those who are interested in the scientific understanding of dyslexia would be better served reading this American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement than by watching an hour “documentary”.
With that short reading as background, allow me to offer some comments to the points put forth in the op.
My personal experience is actually the exact opposite. Schools often fail to diagnose dyslexia early, when intervention is most effective, and label instead in fourth or fifth grade, when a child is more than a year behind in reading and should be “reading to learn” instead of still working on “learning to read”. The motivation is simple: not enough money to provide the early services. What also often happens is that a bright child with dyslexia is able to cover it up for a few years - their deficient decoding skills are compensated for by memorizing more whole word shapes and using context clues for words they do not recognize, other words and pictures on the page. By fourth grade and beyond however there are fewer pictures and too many words to memorize. But by then the window for optimal remediation has begun to close, and the kids need to spend intellectual energy remediating their reading instead of learning the material being presented in the grade.
Correct. A popular myth is that dyslexia is a visual processing issue. It clearly is not. It is, as that policy statement puts it a neurologic issue based on “phonological coding deficit” … “Importantly, the definition of dyslexia does not include reversal of letters or words or mirror reading or writing, which are commonly held misconceptions. … Numerous studies have shown that children with dyslexia or related learning disabilities have the same visual function and ocular health as children without such conditions.8,30,31,45,46,48–59 Specifically, subtle eye or visual problems, including visual perceptual disorders, refractive error, abnormal focusing, jerky eye movements, binocular dysfunction, and misaligned or crossed eyes, do not cause dyslexia.8,30,31,45,46,48–59 In summary, research has shown that most reading disabilities are not caused by altered visual function.”
This point makes little sense. Multiple studies (many referenced in that policy statement) document specific deficits. By definition kids with dyslexia are of normal or above normal IQ with a specific difficulty in learning to read. Not low IQ.
Yes, that is the definition of dyslexia. No parents usually do not rush for it and many do not understand it. By definition these kids are not “slow”. And they are not unmotivated. But most of the time they are being handled as if they are one or both. Yes there is a whole industry of quackery, including “developmental optometry” and tinted glasses and so on, that the cited policy statement spends some energy debunking.
The quackery does not work. Agreed.
Not all children with reading disability have the same brain issue and the appropriate intervention depends on the age and other abilities of the child. Most children just learning to read will pick up the rules of phonics automatically; children with dyslexia won’t. They need to be taught those rules explicitly and with repetition. The readers designed to do that in Kindergarten and first grade and inappropriate to use for a fifth grader with the same reading level. A fifth grader should also be allowed other means of accessing the information, a go-around tactic, while remediation is in progress. I’ve been recommending the Kindle to some older children and reading along a more age appropriate book with the “read to me” feature.
Sounds like a great program, but what it is doing is identifying dyslexic children early and intervening early with the standard sorts of dyslexia interventions. Early identification and early intervention works.
No, those of us who know dyslexia exist heartily endorse the sort of early identification and early intervention that program would provide. If you want to say that identifying a child with “this neurological handicap” that leads them to have a specific difficulty in learning to read despite otherwise normal intelligence do not have dyslexia, even though that is the standard definition of what dyslexia is, go ahead. Call it Ubbabooba, I don’t care. Just do early identification and intervention. And if that has not occurred then allow strategies so that the material can get into the brain even if the child cannot read it by use of alternative technologies while remediation is also in progress.
Yes, but the nature of Chinese as a written language makes it much more complex.
Thanks for the article, DSeid!
If not diagnosed until a later grade not accomodating them will make their reading disability into a fund of knowledge disability as well. I don’t buy the IQ bit but if you can’t read the history book and you don’t have another means of access to that knowledge, you cannot learn the material, no matter how otherwise smart you are. Don’t hold off on other teaching/learning while awaiting successful remediation.
I think almost everyone has some sort of issue with literacy. Sevenwood’s daughter deals with moving letters. Monstro has problems with numbers. Todderbob mixes alphanumeric combination. Rick has problems with M and N.
Me personally, a lot of times my mind throws up decides to drop words like ‘not’ or sometimes pops up the antonym of the word I wanted, so I semi-frequently say the exact opposite of what I meant. I’ve learned to always reread a sentence immediately after I write it to make sure it means what I meant it to say.
The thing is, that doesn’t mean I have a reading disability. I take my issue, and all the other self reported issues being posted here, as a sign that for many reading is not an absolute perfect skill. It’s not a simple are you literate yes/no binary thing. It’s a scale with completely illiterate at one end and perfect reading comprehension without ever making a mistake on the other. Most people fall somewhere in between. I believe dyslexia is nothing but the lower end of the bell curve. We label them as if they are different when, really, they have the same sort of issues everyone else has just it’s worse than usual for them.
Which means that I think any special program for dyslexia is pure crap that won’t do dick. Or, perhaps more accurately, if a special program for dyslexia does help, it would help EVERYONE since dyslexics aren’t fundamentally different from everyone else.
.aixelsyd sah rehtorb ym, ton s’ti no
…VY no lennahc aixelsyd a saw yllaer ereht hsiw I
In my experience, schools don’t like diagnosing learning disorders, including dyslexia. It costs them a lot more money for resources for the student. My district will not even test for it unless the student tests two grade levels below their actual grade.
Remember that dyslexia is descriptive It is a symptom. It is describing a set of behaviors- which certainly do exist. So the question here is not “does dyslexia exist” but rather “what are the root causes of these behaviors (and of course the same symptoms may have different causes in different people) and how do we deal with them.”
On it’s not? I wonder if there’s a word for a mistake like that?
Every item described above is something that happens to everyone.
This actually supports the OP’s argument. Why should “normal or above average IQ” be part of the definition of such a condition? It seems inexplicable that there could be a disorder which can never exist in people with below-average IQs.
Later on you said that the Cambridge study was engaged in early identification and treatment of children with dyslexia. But the study treated students with all kinds of IQs–low, high and normal. Based on what you’ve said about the definition of Dyslexia, the study was treating both students with and without dyslexia, since it was treating students both with and without normal-to-above-average IQs.
Sorry but no. None of the kids I grew up with had these issues, and neither did my children.
So I am going to need a good cite that what I went through was normal and everyone went the same thing.
It is part of the definition of any specific learning disorder. A child who is globally delayed does not have a specific learning disorder, they have global delay. To be more precise it actually does not require normal IQ, it requires a substantial difference between the overall ability, such as measured in the Full Scale IQ, and the specific subscore. The generally accepted standard is 1.5 standard deviations. (I did misspeak when I stated normal or above normal IQ was part of the definition and apologize for that. But for practical purposes such is the case.)
I am honestly not going to watch an hour documentary right now, but I find it very hard to believe that they performed the exact same intervention with children who were Full Scale IQ of 77.5 and less (globally delayed 1.5 SD or more) and children who were average IQ (100) but specifically deficient in early reading skills and had the same results. Please point me to the time marker where they claim that, or better yet, to a published version of that study in the literature.
Most children with dyslexia, being overall normal intelligence, have a fine time understanding the words and the concepts appropriate for their age. They have, on average, the same attention span and the same ability to follow instructions as other normal intelligence children of their age. Children with global delay of 1.5 SD or more often do not.
I cannot speak to how things are done in the UK, but in the US any child identified as any learning disability is supposed to get an Individualized Educational Plan (an IEP) which is supposed to attempt to educate the child in the least restrictive manner possible, individualized to the needs and abilities of that specific child. Most often that means a reading specialist, either one on one or in groups, for reading disability. The same sort of basic reading remediation techniques (as stated in the cited Policy statement: “specific instruction in decoding, fluency training, vocabulary, and comprehension.1,4–8,13,15 The approach to learning decoding skills begins with explicit instruction in recognizing spoken sounds (phonemic awareness), becoming aware of rhyme, learning the alphabetic code, memorizing sight words, and studying phonics and spelling”) may be applied to the child with global delay as to the child with a specific delay but their IEPs will still be very different. And the IEP for a fifth grader with severe dyslexia, reading at a first grade level but otherwise of average or above ability, better be very different than the IEP for a fifth grader who is functioning at a first grade level globally.
I have the written form of dyslexia - when spelling out words by hand, I often write the second letter first.
That’s a real thing, right?
Really?
When your kids were first learning to read and write they always got the diagonals going the right way on their "N"s and never did the wrong number of humps on “N” and "M"s? They never wrote “Z” backwards or made any other letter reversals?
All my kids did. And I thought it was cute at the time.
Thing is that they went through that phase of learning to read and write fairly quickly those difficulties went away as their reading and writing level progress. Those are common difficulties among those at a low reading level and most progress to a higher level fairly quickly. Those individuals with dyslexia do not progress so quickly and therefore those difficulties and errors persist, and persist long enough and to old enough of ages that those with dyslexia note them themselves. But they are a correlate of the reading difficulty, not the cause of the difficulty.
…ti rof drow ydaerla ylbaborp s’erehT
Actually, for true dyslexics, the whole “reading letters backwards” is a myth. My brother describes it as letters getting jumbled around, or scattering to the corner of the page, stuff like that. He wasn’t diagnosed until age 16, god only knows how he got decent grades in school before his condition was finally discovered.
This is clearly not true. If a specific learning disorder has a specific cause, that specific cause may be present in children with a variety of overall intelligence levels.
The claim is that reading does not require much intelligence in the first place, and reading problems are essentially unrelated to overall intelligence.
Much in the same way that if you saw a group of children with broken legs having trouble learning to walk, you wouldn’t say “the bright ones have dyswalksia, the slower ones are just slow to learn anything.”
The argument is silly. The reason for the existence of multiple disorders is because they require different treatment. If the same treatment worked for dyslexics and slow learners, then we wouldn’t have ever needed to come up with the word dyslexic.
Could it be that some slow learners have the same mental deficiency as dyslexics along with their other problems? Sure. But the idea that all slow learners must be dyslexic is stupid, since the same techniques don’t work.
You guys are insisting that dyslexia should be a disease, not a disorder. If we do ever identify the disease, it should get a different name.