The problem is that different groups define it differently. The most common one is exemplified by this from the NIH:
That said I think your defintion is better and your explanation is clear. (Although I would add in adequate opportunity to learn. Poor reading because of lack of exposure or teaching is not dyslexia.) Often a 15 point discrepency between reading scores and overall ability (not achievement) is used as “incommensurate.” The thing is, as said earlier in this reanimated thread, that there is a distinction between someone who is globally delayed (e.g. due to Down Syndrome or brain damage) and someone who has a specific learning disability. Sure it is possible that someone who is globally delayed can also have a specific area that is much more delayed … but it is harder to notice let alone to untangle that.
The problem I think comes in when we try to define and measure that slippery beast “intelligence” and the myth of g (IMHO) … most measures depend quite a bit on the skills that roll into reading skills so “IQ” can be “low” as a result of poor reading skills. Hence those with ample abilty to otherwise learn can be deprived of the opportunity to have their reading disability remediated. That may have been the point of the original documentary that monstro had linked to.
All my life I have gone from an uncaring, Libertarian type philosophy to a more liberal one. I have had these firm beliefs about the world that I have had to give up one by one. Mexicans are lazy…learning disabilities are bullcrap - they are just dumb…welfare queens…people on SSI are scamming the system…etc etc etc etc.
Every single one of them have been wrong. I have had to climb a mountain of shit over my life to see through these stupidities.
While I will entertain reversing the course I have experienced for my life and entertain the idea that Dyslexia doesn’t really exist it will only be done if there is very compelling evidence.
Nope. Under EAHCA (now IDEA), districts (through teachers) have a duty called child-find in which they must actively try to find children with disabilities. If I’m in early childhood education and I suspect a child might possibly perhaps maybe have dyslexia (of which an indicator is bright yet has trouble reading) then it is my legal obligation to inform the parent and suggest testing. Under the law there is no choice.
Except that reading is related to language processing. If I show you an aleph and you have never seen it before, you would view it as a drawing. If I show you a “p” then you cannot help but see it as the letter and not a vertical line with a partial circle next to it. So the brain is filtering what it sees through the language area of the brain. In this way it may be very similar (or a form of) aphasia just with the printed word and not spoken words.
As soon as you involve IQ there are whole other issues involves that enter into measuring intelligence. But let’s ignore that and say whomever said decoding isn’t a major skill is plain wrong. First you have sight words which relies on memory so any issues with memory will affect that part of reading. Second is the fact that if you are decoding words then you are not reading for comprehension. All you are doing is looking at letters with no semantic value to the word. Thirdly, decoding is not the same as reading for meaning. You can know every word in a sentence and still have no clue what the sentence means. This is even worse if you decode letter by letter.
Welcome to the world of special education. When I worked in SpEd I “diagnosed” students with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) which was basically “Something’s not right but I’ve got no clue what it is. BUT I do know how it manifests.”
ADD was severely overdiagnosed when I first started teaching and it may be similar with dyslexia. And you’re right - being a dumbass is not a disability. But ultimately you are neglecting two facts:
Diagnosing dyslexia from dumbassery is not an exact science. Just like many “ADD kids” are really just unfocused there may be students that have difficulty reading and are wrongfully diagnosed as dyslexic but let me ask you this: if they have difficulty reading isn’t there a problem somewhere even if it is not dyslexia per se?
What incentive do I have for diagnosing a student with dyslexia? I don’t get a kickback from “Big Dyslexia” for every client I sign up. There may be psychologists willing to diagnose a kid with whatever the parent wants (that was a huge industry in the 1990s with ADD) but that’s true in any profession. Some doctors give meds for the asking yet surely you are not suggesting real illnesses don’t exist.
So dyslexia isn’t curable? What a surprise.
We in education have know for years that having an “inner voice” when you read makes you a better reader. This is true for everyone and if something interferes with that whether a learning disability, learning a second language or something else then you won’t read as well.
When working in special ed, I had a lot of success with getting students to develop mental images when reading. And guess what, that works for poor readers that do not have dyslexia as well. Why is it that the same solution addressing the same symptom means the causes are the same as well. Does that mean that the clap and a UTI are the same because they are both caused by bacteria, cause painful urination and are treated with antibiotics? Major fallacy in reasoning here.
So a program that helps (dyslexic) students to read better also helps poor readers? Shocking!
I can’t answer that specifically but I can say there are a lot of those in the SpEd field (both parents and educators) that believe that a pull-out system is not the best setting. Perhaps that is the objection?
Overall, I guess I don’t see the logic here. Is the documentary claiming that dyslexia does not exist and is simply poor reading skills since they both have similar manifestations and strategies to overcome the difficulties? That’s fallacious reasoning (affirming the consequent). I also disagree that dyslexia is overdiagnosed. I rarely see students with that on their IEP and the number of parents who try to get their child diagnosed as dyslexic for the benefits is very small.
My nephew has a reading disablity. It is not described as dyslexia, though he was tested for it. Rather, it was determined he had eye-tracking problems that interfered with his ability to read. It made the letters and words jump around and it gave him headaches to concentrate.
But he is a very bright kid, so he was able to forestall diagnosis and intervention until he was around 8 or 9. He had all sorts of coping strategies to get around having to read things. One my sister (his mother) noticed after they were looking for problems: it was his birthday. He had a party and several friends over. Instead of opening his cards and reading them, he asked “Who wants to read my cards to the group?” He conned the group into reading things aloud for him by making it an honor, rather than reading himself.
With diagnosis, my sister was able to get him a specialist who worked with him, giving him reading exercises to retrain his eyes. He had a workbook with various assignments that required focusing on letters in different places, etc. The therapy paid off, he went from being uninterested in reading to being able to enjoy reading for pleasure.
He still has some difficulties. He does have a 504 plan and the teachers are working with my mother to identify appropriate remedies. Sometimes having extra time, some other things I haven’t really followed.
My points: First off, getting special accommodations does not require one be “dyslexic”. Second, bright children who have reading problems can mask them and make them harder to identify or even spot occurring.
Would you treat any of the following cases differently from each other, both in an early grade when kid are usually learning to read, and/or at higher grade levels when kids are needing to read in order to learn?
A slow reader who is globally delayed despite ample opportunities to learn.
A slow reader who seems to be of otherwise normal intelligence or higher and who has had ample opportunity to learn to read.
A slow reader who seems to be of normal intelligence or higher who has, due to sociocultural deprivation, not had adequate opportunity to learn to read.
A child who is of average reading skill but who is in every other area testing in the highly gifted range such that his/her reading scores are, say two S.D., below his/her other abilities.
The last is a special case, to be sure, but the others are all slow readers. Should they all be handled the same?
The biggest distinction is whether or not a person reads slowly because they are naturally slow or because there is something that hinders them. In almost every case, the solution is to have the student read more and develop reading strategies but there is no one way to deal with problems. Some work better with a colored gel on top of the page, some do not. Some read better with serif fonts, some do better with sans serif. Some have really bizzare disabilities like one of my students that couldn’t read (decode) words but he could read paragraphs.
But ultimately, the goal is to move students out of decoding and into reading for comprehension so tricks like having an inner voice or visual imagery helps every student. The example you did not present that is at the heart of the issue is what about readers where the visual perception is not consistent where a p can look like a p sometimes and like a q other times or a N that sometimes appears as a Cyrilic I (the reversed “N”)
I think the question would be is that a trait of a particular kind of learning problem or a general trait of poor reading skill. The OP seems to be arguing that that situation is not diagnostic and is either not real or is merely a symptom of any reading disability.
I would like to see the documentary. This subject is of particular interest to me as a former English, reading, speech, and communications teacher.
When I was at Peabody College for Teachers, one thing I learned in a marvelous four hour PE class is that there is often a difference in developing dyslexia in babies who learn to cross-crawl and those who don’t. It has to do with wiring of the brain.
Thank you for taking the time to summarize the documentary, Monstro.
Sorry. It’s one I get asked about lots by parents who have heard it from somewhere and are worried because their child has gone straight to walking without ever crawling … or butt scoots instead of crawling … and it simply is not true. Anecdotally all those kids learned to read fine, some ended up gifted even, and none of the kids with severe dyslexia in my practice were among the kids who had skipped crawling or butt scooted instead. There is absolutely nothing out there that shows any correlation between not crawling and reading disability or any other deficits.
I once tried to track down where the myth came from and the best I could come up with was from an old trendy (and both silly and discreditted) PT school of thought called “patterning” -
But the myth lives on, generally spread by physical and occupational therapists.
You’re wrong, dyslexia is real. I belong to DNA, the National Dyslexic Association and we are fighting to make dyslexia a class 3 disorder in the next DSM
The Hebrew copying experiment doesn’t sound accurate to me. They probably recreated it as you or I would recreate a picture. Looking at letters as a whole seems like a different cup of tea
[ul]
[li]Reading at a level well below the expected level for the age of your child[/li][li]Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears[/li][li]Difficulty comprehending rapid instructions[/li][li]Trouble following more than one command at a time[/li][li]Problems remembering the sequence of things[/li][li]Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words[/li][li]An inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word[/li][li]Seeing letters or words in reverse (“b” for “d” or “saw” for “was,” for example) — this is common in young children, but may be more pronounced in children with dyslexia[/li][li]Difficulty spelling[/li][li]Trouble learning a foreign language [/li][/QUOTE]
I suspect this full editor’s comment about the article in Science is behind the wall but I will cut and paste some small bits from it. It is interesting.
It really irritates me when everyone uses the term Dyslexia so loosely to describe every small problem they ever had with reading including- hating to read out loud to other people, occasional typos, transposing written letters, or writing them backwards when you where a child, saying nana instead of banana or not being able to say cinomin or spell cinamin, or getting bored while reading and not finishing, not being able to read boring books like Moby Dick— these things do not mean you are dyslexic.
The definition of dyslexia changes every time a new publishing company posts a new expert dyslexia help site online, written to sell their books or gimmicky reading tools such as special tinted glasses, or phonics card systems. The definition changes again when a popular youtube celebrity posts their “I am a dyslexia survivor” a video that gets 300,000,000 million views where the dyslexic states her symptom was…“couldn’t read out loud in class without feeling self conscious or embarassed or talk in front of large crowds of people” but she overcame that dyslexia problem and now is doing great in college…
If someone says they are dyslexic it really could mean anything.
I actually can’t spell cinamon right off the bat—but that doesn’t mean I am dyslexic? No, all it means is my brain can’t remember all the quirky ways of spelling billions and billions of words in the English language, which uses a phonetic alphabet but doesn’t spell anything phonetically. English has way too many words with two "n"s for no reason.
Instead of trying to fix dyslexics why don’t we just rewrite the English language so that it really is totally phonetic? Take out all the double letters that don’t need to be there, spell tomorrow as tomorow, and remove all silent letters, change dumb to dum, change what to wut, change it all into how you wuld write it if you where texting- shortn everything and make it phonetic. Having less letters would be a lot easier for dyslexics and non-dyslexics alike, it would save forests and paper. Where is Chairman Mao now that we really need him?