WhyNot:
But I still can’t stress this enough - the best way to build spelling, grammar and vocabulary skills is to read, read, read.
Absolutely. I’d also add that the more you read the better your composition skills.
Kelby
January 28, 2012, 4:47pm
22
DSeid:
I certainly agree that not all with dyslexia are the same, and that while phonemic awareness difficulties are the most common cause (especially of the inheritable sort) of dyslexia, and in fact can predict it , that there are other difficulties that also result in reading difficulties. And your test does indeed discriminate between those with phonological vs. orthographic difficulties, and illustrates the difference well … but I am not as convinced that orthographic difficulties equals “visual system” difficulties. The distinction is perhaps better expressed as “words” vs. “rules” (as coined by Pinker ). Pinker (that book, p.246) would place the common form of dyslexia, the phonological one, as having a problem in the rule pathway, and those who have no difficulty with applying the rules, can sound out nonsense words fine, but who would mispronounce irregular words like “yacht” and “aisle” (or spell “clean” and “klene”) as having a problem in the “whole-word” pathway and as having “surface dyslexia.” The book is a great read btw, more about using linguistics as a model for brain function in general. That process of learning the individual words, deducing the rules, and then learning when the rule does not apply, is at a higher level than visual processing … which does not disprove that visual processing is ever a factor, of course. (I wonder if the kids who do the “klene” are also prone to more often say “catched” instead of “caught” and otherwise fail to identify and apply irregular language exceptions … but that gets even farther off-topic.)
I suspect that you understand why I am so eager to make clear the likely very small role that visual processing plays in reading difficulties. There is an industry out there exploiting that myth: the developmental optometrists who sell parents on special glasses and visual training exercises for their dyslexic children despite the evidence that it does nothing for these kids at all. A general public convinced that dyslexics literally see letters or words reversed, see letters jumbled, can’t visually track, is more easily sold on such snake oil.
“Visual system” is an oversimplification of the complex processing involved and I agree that some might confuse problems in this area with those some optometrists propose to treat, e.g., putative issues with binocualrity and visual tracking.
I asked my optometrist about his opnion of visual training for reading/learning problems and he asserted that about half the doctors he knew considered it to be hogwash. It’s also expensive.