The mixture of science and politics in Sir James Rose's report on dyslexia will have positive and negative consequences. The positive consequences can be welcomed, and the negative ones overcome by attention to detail in considering evidence and teaching.
Positive.
- Dyslexia is officially accepted as a cause of literacy problems.
- Visual stress is recognised as a cause of literacy problems
- Schools need to recognise this, and parents should not have to fight them to get help
- There is to be money for training teachers
Negative
- Dyslexia has been conflated with a range of reading and spelling difficulties stemming from problems with language.
- Scientific evidence on brain functions is not properly considered and is lightly dismissed.
The negative aspects can be overcome by attention to detail. Essentially, a teacher meeting a person with a literacy problem needs to ask him or herself two questions.
What is it in this person's thinking that is preventing them from reading or spelling effectively?
How do I help them to adjust their thinking so that they can read or spell?
The answers need to be based on direct observation, not on the application of some pre-determined forumula. As a person reads, they may guess at words from their first letter, may sound them out, with extra bits of vowel attached to consonants, so that the process doesn't work, may just give up at a word they don't know, may misread a word to make sense of an earlier error. One way or another, they are not using all of the information the letters provide. And do their eyes hurt? Do they rub their eyes, or get headaches? Are they uncomfortable under fluorescent light Any indication that visual stress is a factor needs to be checked out.
The solution then depends on the evidence. Tests are good at detecting weaknesses in performance, but not at getting to the underlying reasons. An assessment based purely on tests is therefore inadequate as a means of informing teaching. All assessments should include direct observation of the child reading and writing, videoed if necessary.
Teaching needs to be put into immediate practice in the context of things the learner wants to read and write. There is no point whatever in grinding a child or adult through one series of phonic patterns after another if they do not also learn to apply them in their work. This is the main weakness of nearly every commercial scheme, and the reason is the underlying weaknesses in processing of people with dyslexia and some of its look-alikes. Whatever is taught in an abstract context needs to be reinforced with carefully designed practice, using books the child is interested in, but in a way that makes learning to read for these people much more like learning to play a musical instrument than like a normal English lesson.
The final weakness in Rose's report is that heand his colleagues define the severity of dyslexia in terms of the response to their teaching methods - the more severely dyslexic they are, the harder they are to teach. This shows the fallacy of their lumping dyslexia and language problems together. The people who respond well to their teaching have language problems. The people who don't probably have the processing difficulties in the brain that the "narrow research definition" (Snowling) refers to as dyslexic. The pattern of teaching for the two is likely to be different. Provided teachers understand this, and base their work on the pattern of direct observation and practical reinforcement in the tradition of Grace Fernald - who does not appear anywhere in their references - then they will be able to build on Rose's positives, and make up for his and his colleagues' political fudging.
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