MP says dyslexia is "cruel fictional disorder"

[tkingdoll]

Well now you know of a bit more. ... So you've read articles about how babies merely exposed to television all day without getting one-to-one communication from parents don't do so well; and yet you still hypothesise that my brother's baby might have gained a higher level of language attainment than he has, based merely on listening to people talking on television, minus the one-to-one communication his parents give him?

No, I said he might have, or a lower one, or the same, but you have no way of knowing. And the results you cite might be general predictors, but they're not absolute!

And did I make any grand claims for that anecdote? Is it not possible to put a cute little anecdote for people to contemplate on here without being accused of trying to build a whole case on it?

Well, you kinda did present your nephew as evidence that talking a lot to babies aids development, yes. I'm merely pointing out that you don't actually know whether that's true, particularly without a benchmark. Everyone's kid or nephew is a genius But I'm sure he's a great kid. If he had a twin, you could do some experiments! Ethical? Me?

 

[drkitten]

I'm not disputing that talking to a baby helps with language development, I don't know anything about the topic. It may or may not. It seems likely that it does. I'm disputing that one anecdote is evidence for it though. There are presumably studies out there which could enlighten us.

My understanding is that talking to a baby -- and parental interaction in general -- is not only an important factor, but possibly the most important factor in language development. Some citations if you want to read about it would include Growing up with Language: How Children Learn to Talk, Naomi S. Baron (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992) or Talking from Infancy: How to Nurture and Cultivate Early Language Development William Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books, 1990).

 

[Darat]

Wasn't there that terrible case of a girl in the 1970s who had been kept isolated and tied to a chair until her teens and who never has (did?) learn to speak fluently. Her language skills were meant to never have exceeded that of a toddler. And I think at the time the people who treated her believed that this was because she had never been spoken to when she was younger and her brain never developed the capacity for adult speech?

Sorry for the vagueness but this is something I must have read or seen about 20 years or so ago.

ETA: I think this most have been the case I was thinking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) , it is a harrowing story but it doesn't seem that it would be possible to conclude anything from the limited study of the poor child.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Wasn't there that terrible case of a girl in the 1970s who had been kept isolated and tied to a chair until her teens and who never has (did?) learn to speak fluently. Her language skills were meant to never have exceeded that of a toddler. And I think at the time the people who treated her believed that this was because she had never been spoken to when she was younger and her brain never developed the capacity for adult speech?

Sorry for the vagueness but this is something I must have read or seen about 20 years or so ago.

Yes, however, it wasn't possible to be certain in that case because the father claimed that the child was diagnosed as retarded in the first place.

 

[shuize]

I still invert "p"s and "b"s. Mostly when I'm typing. But I know there's more to it because I will occasionally do it when writing longhand.

 

[Baby Nemesis]

No, I said he might have, or a lower one, or the same, but you have no way of knowing. And the results you cite might be general predictors, but they're not absolute!

The fact that you also said that my brother's baby watching television all day and not hearing his parents talk to him might also have resulted in the same or a lower development doesn't mean you didn't also say that doing so might have led to a higher level of development. What toddler do you imagine would have the attention span to sit in front of a television for long enough and attentively enough to pick up a level of language that would be better than that of his peers who were being spoken to day-in day-out by his parents? And how could it possibly be so easy to pick up language from the television when so many words are spoken that it must be difficult to relate individual words to individual objects? For instance, if a mother says "food" every time she's about to give her baby something to eat, and if she says "daddy" every time her husband comes in the door from work, the baby's surely far more likely to learn to associate those words with those particular things/people than if merely subjected to a stream of talk coming from the television, where individual words aren't so obviously related to individual objects/events/people etc. Even where you have children's programmes where pictures are held up and the word of what the picture is is pronounced a few times, the same programme isn't likely to be on every day, so it would be far more difficult for a baby to memorise the word than it is where a mother or father's repeating a word every day, or several or many times a day, that the baby can come to associate with a particular object. And that's besides the difficulty of the baby being able to translate the pictures on television into something meaningful enough to be able to associate them with what's going on in his daily life. For instance, he won't necessarily associate the picture of food on the television with the times when his mother takes him into the kitchen to give him something to eat, something that might be entirely different.

What I said about my brother's baby was equivalent to the tag-line on the end of something that backed up what it was saying, not a major point in itself. Some experts believe it's important for the development of a baby's brain for parents to talk to it early on, a view that was featured in the documentary I linked to the transcript of part of.

 

[wollery]

Just a small note. Illiteracy and dyslexia are not the same thing. I used to have a friend who, despite being acutely dyslexic, was extremely well read. It just took him longer to work out what the words meant.

 

[CORed]

Regarding the reversal thing, when I was a small child, I used to reverse letters. I once drew a picture of a "POTS" sign. It was pretty crude. I still can't draw worth a damn, but it had a post, an octagon and the word "POTS" -- stop spelled backwards -- on it. As best as I can remember, I did not reverse the letters, just the order. Yet I had no difficulty learning to read, and had pretty well picked it up on my own before I started formal training.

 

[iiwo]

Just a few general thoughts to throw in:

--The ~100% literacy rate mentioned: does that include the entire population, or just those who reach a certain benchmark?

--I am probably preaching to the choir (or at least A choir) on this but I think dyslexia is a real problem. It may be over-diagnosed or used as a scapegoat and/or discourage the kid from trying even if the teacher is willing and skilled. This particular point has been made a couple of times.

--To say dyslexia does not exist is cruel to those who do suffer from various reading, mmm...disorders if I may use that word.

--I would agree with the idea that English is a difficult language to learn to read due to many rules, counter-rules, and exceptions. This probably has to do with the fact that it has roots in not only multiple languages, but in languages that are not necessarily related to begin with.

--The question would then be: what are we going to do about it? (It being how to teach literacy rather than fixing the entire language--although that is worth considering as well).

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

If a person claims to be dyslexic, can anything be infered from this statement to help him or her without much more specific information being provided?

 

[Dancing David]

All I can say is that that the classrooms were oases of peace and quiet back then. No moralising,please do not jump to conclusions.

Uh huh, and your contention that a trip to the headmaster was all it took is still boojum.

How many students never went, dropped out or never really learned while they were there ?

You are a fool if you moralize a neurological disorder which impacts the ability of some people to maintain focus in highly structured situations and claim that a trip to the headmaster 'cures' it.

Pure moral hokum.

 

[Dancing David]

Lucky you. A guy I know who never finished school and still can't read, all because his school said he was retarded, not so much. Of course, he was in school probably many years - if not decades - before you.

I don't know. Let us see first grade was in 62-63, second in 63-64. In CA they used phonics so while i could fake the rest of school, I did not read beyond three letter words. then there was the years we lived in mexico 64-65 and our mother home schooled us. This was when I was taught to read by my mother, which i am grateful for. However the process was not a good one, with much frustration, anger and shaming on her part. However i had some basic reading skills at the end.

Spelling has always been a problem, it is easier for me en espanol, i italiano, however it has been the bane of my existence. In fourth grade I read very little but was able to manage in school, in fifth grade i was tracked into a low class when we moved to NY, I was in the 'C' class by the end of the year. And I was in the 'B' class for sixth grade.

i read, but very , very , very slowly. I shape read most words, and memorized how to spell words as i went. But until the advent of spell check (now the wonder of Mozilla) the spelling of words escaped me. Even when i memorize and make lists of the words i am most likely to mis-spell, i get them wrong.

Fortunately i have an okay memory, good math and verbal skills. i read slowly but voraciously once I was in middle school. But I now catch myself when i am shape reading words and make sure that i actualy have read the word correctly.

 

[borealys]

If a person claims to be dyslexic, can anything be infered from this statement to help him or her without much more specific information being provided?

Not really. You need to know what kind of dyslexia they've got. Difficulty with phonological processing is the most common type -- these are the kids who can't seem to break down the words into their component sounds and put them back together again, much less associate those component sounds with letters. (DD made a remark about not being able to perceive that the sound/letter "a" plus the sound/letter "b" make up the syllable "ab" without thinking about it. It seems obvious to anyone with normal phonological processing skills, but to someone with phonological dyslexia, it very much isn't.) To learn to read, these kids need explicit, detailed phonics instruction. They're usually okay at memorizing sight words, though.

Then there's surface or whole-word dyslexia. These are kids that can sound out words with no problem, but have major difficulty building up a repertoire of sight words. Often, they have to say a word aloud to figure out what it means, and if the word has an atypical spelling pattern, they won't be able to read it at all (think, for instance, of the word yacht). These aren't kids who need phonics instruction. They need help remembering sight words.

There are people, too, who have both types. And people who have co-occurring attention, memory, language, or other cognitive disorders. All of that will impact how they're treated.

And, though it's rare, visual dyslexia, where the letters and words actually appear scrambled to the reader, does exist. That one is a visual processing problem, not a language problem, and is treated differently again.

Spelling has always been a problem, it is easier for me en espanol, i italiano, however it has been the bane of my existence.

Case in point about transparency of writing systems. Spanish and Italian are so much simpler in their sound-symbol correspondences than English.

 

[kerikiwi]

started her on phonics. In fifteen minutes her reading speed doubled. End of her problem.

My skeptic bells are ringing.
How did you measure her 'reading speed' before the 15 minute lesson? And after?
Did she read a passage aloud? Did she read a passage silently? Was it the same passage?
All sorts of variables come into play.

 

[bruto]

My skeptic bells are ringing.
How did you measure her 'reading speed' before the 15 minute lesson? And after?
Did she read a passage aloud? Did she read a passage silently? Was it the same passage?
All sorts of variables come into play.

I was never dyslexic, and I don't know how reading speed would be measured in such cases, but I do wish to add my anecdotal story to the whole word versus phonics issue. When I was 5 1/2, I started first grade at a Detroit public school where whole word teaching was the only technique, and by December of that year, when I could not read anything at all, teachers voiced their concern to my parents. They quizzed me a bit, and found out that I could not distinguish one word from another because I was seeing them as complex pictures, and proceeded to teach me phonically. My dad had learned phonically, and also had been taught to "look for the little word in the big one." It took almost no time at all, because they were good teachers, I had a good vocabulary, and I did at least know the alphabet. I just hadn't been taught the connection between letters and sounds. It was a "eureka" similar to mender's, and I went from non-reader to the ability to read anything put in front of me pretty nearly overnight.

I don't see any reason why one couldn't informally but reasonably reliably measure a kid's reading speed, if one is sitting in the car and listening to her read.

 

[kerikiwi]

I went from non-reader to the ability to read anything put in front of me pretty nearly overnight.

I don't see any reason why one couldn't informally but reasonably reliably measure a kid's reading speed, if one is sitting in the car and listening to her read.

Again the bells are ringing: 'pretty nearly overnight'?

'Reading speed' is not something we (down here in NZ) use as a stand alone assessment of reading achievement.
A child of 8 reading a passage at a 6 year reading age may read fuently, but not be reading at an age appropriate level.

 

[bruto]

Again the bells are ringing: 'pretty nearly overnight'?

'Reading speed' is not something we (down here in NZ) use as a stand alone assessment of reading achievement.
A child of 8 reading a passage at a 6 year reading age may read fuently, but not be reading at an age appropriate level.

I don't remember now exactly how quickly I learned, but I know it was very quick. As I said, it was a "eureka" moment, the kind of situation where you realize "I already knew that, but didn't know I knew." It was like cracking a code. I had been badly taught in a confusing way that did not address the way I prefer to learn, but ready to read. When well taught in a way that coincided with my learning styel, I found quite quickly that I could read, and when properly taught to read, a person who can read anything at all can pretty well read anything. Your bells are welcome to ring, but I don't think it's that uncommon an event, and in any case, I did introduce it as anecdotal.

 

[kerikiwi]

Your bells are welcome to ring, but I don't think it's that uncommon an event, and in any case, I did introduce it as anecdotal.

In my 35 years plus of teaching children to read better ('better' because there is no can read/can't read line) it is an exceedingly uncommon event. I would go so far as to say an unknown event.
I realise it was anecdotal. Which is why I treated it skeptically.

 

[Baby Nemesis]

I don't remember now exactly how quickly I learned, but I know it was very quick. As I said, it was a "eureka" moment, the kind of situation where you realize "I already knew that, but didn't know I knew." It was like cracking a code. I had been badly taught in a confusing way that did not address the way I prefer to learn, but ready to read. When well taught in a way that coincided with my learning styel, I found quite quickly that I could read, and when properly taught to read, a person who can read anything at all can pretty well read anything. Your bells are welcome to ring, but I don't think it's that uncommon an event, and in any case, I did introduce it as anecdotal.

The series of television programmes I linked to and quoted the write-up of earlier, about the people who'd spent years in school not being able to learn to read, and then went on an adult education course where different styles of teaching were tried, showed a few people picking up reading very quickly when a style that suited them was tried. For instance, there was one woman who was upset at the beginning, thinking she wouldn't be able to learn, but then the teacher gave her letter shapes to experiment with, and she said she felt as if something had just clicked and it suddenly all made sense. She started learning very quickly after that. Here's an account on someone's blog.

 

[moebob]

Just to give you a little something; My youngest brother is dyslexic, bad spelling for everything ahead of time. I'm 52 years old, I remember my bro, was 10 years younger than me, his name is David, he signed his papers in first grade, and then in second grade bavib. It was never caught. When he graduated High School he still couldn't read or write. He was in trouble all the time for everything. He aced all the finales, he remembered everything he ever heard! And he's very bright, he's just untaught. He passed every year cause he totally aced all the finals! I asked him how he did it when he couldn't read? He said he could read enough, that he knew what answer they wanted!