and not automatically” (Shaywitz 1996). While the literature is clear that persons with dyslexia have a permanent condition, parents and our educational culture, however, ignore this data and follow the belief that given enough remedial training, persons with dyslexia will, someday, have “something click” enabling them to read like their peers. This unrealistic belief leads to unrealistic expectations and school programing that focuses all the students efforts on learning to decode print visually at the expense of developing higher level language, problem solving, and cognitive skills. If we had a choice, we would have bright students with dyslexia be able to decode words automatically like all good visual readers do. However, we don’t have that choice. “Longitudinal studies show that of the children who are diagnosed as reading disabled in third grade, 74% remain disabled in ninth grade (Fletcher, et al., 1994; Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, & Makuch, 1992; Stanovich, 1986; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994). Bright reading disabled students need to make progress in visual reading and get as good as possible at decoding and “sounding out words”. These reading skills will be invaluable in their academic and personal lives, but, at best, reading will be accurate, but slow. They will never get to the level of rapid, automatic decoding and without “...automaticity... reading remains effortful, even for the brightest people with childhood histories of dyslexia .”(Shaywitz 1996) These students are, inadvertently, trapped in a world without access to print, sometimes, in the misguided hope that this will force them to become adequate visual readers out of necessity.” The answer to the question came into clear focus when a top researcher on dyslexia, Sally Shaywitz, said, “educators have learned how to help children and young adults to read more accurately… However, no one has figured out how to overcome the lack of fluency. As a consequence, for dyslexic children and adults, instead of its being rapid and automatic, reading remains slow and effortful.” Regarding the second question - when a student with dyslexia starts a program of reading instruction, what is the outlook for that student’s classroom reading fluency in one year, in two years, in five years - neither I nor the Tennessee Center for the Study and Treatment of Dyslexia could find studies which provided this data. The only thing I could find to form a reading outlook were those general descriptions of how students with dyslexia read, including this one: “in a dyslexic student, so-called average scores on reading tests cannot measure the extraordinary effort that went into reading each word, to laboriously pronouncing it syllable by syllable, to rereading it over and over again until it began to sound right and make sense” (Overcoming Dyslexia (2020 Edition): Second Edition, p177). The evidence supporting the idea that it’s unrealistic to expect students with dyslexia to become fluent readers is
Change this picture starting in the first grade. Read The New Narrative: a new vision of the first grader with dyslexia.
using their talents for reading and writing, and keeps them from learning. My first new insight was to understand that while there are a number of characteristics of dyslexia, the key characteristics that keep students from success are only two – difficulty sounding out and spelling words. I learned that reading and writing problems are a secondary consequence of dyslexia. Difficulty sounding out and spelling words are effects of dyslexia. Reading, writing, and learning problems are not. Rather, they are downstream consequences of not fixing the problems with sounding out and spelling words. Secondly, I came to realize that offering an alternative solution would never work so long as people believe that it wasn’t necessary because their children were going to learn to read like everyone else. Even I would prefer that. But was it an option? This led me to look at the research data on the effectiveness of reading instruction for students with dyslexia. I began asking myself questions. Can students with dyslexia learn to read like everyone else? When a student with dyslexia starts a program of reading instruction, what is the outlook for that student’s classroom reading fluency in one year, in two years, in five years? Regarding the first question, I went back to read some articles I had written 20 years ago and found that the first question had been answered back then. I wrote: “Traditional educational practices used in this country with bright students with dyslexia have devastating effects on their language development, work habits, learning, and literacy. “Dyslexia is persistent; it does not go away... Even though many dyslexics learn to read accurately, they continue to read slowly
23
February / March, 2023 | www.closingthegap.com/membership Closing The Gap © 2023 Closing The Gap, Inc. All rights reserved.
BACK TO CONTENTS
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease