Karin Litzcke
member
Registered: 09/04/07
Posts: 187
Loc: Vancouver, BC
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I don’t believe in learning disabilities, and I’m not alone in that camp. But you won’t hear that view very often, because a lot of people are threatened by the idea that there might actually be nothing wrong with the children who are labelled as dyslexic, dysgraphic, discalculaic, ADD, ADHD, or, most recently, as having Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD, or APD, for short).
A Created Problem
Learning disabilities have appeared like clockwork in populations in the wake of specific changes in how children are schooled and parented. Dyslexia, in particular, appeared after the conversion, around 1890 give or take a few decades in different jurisdictions, of pretty much the entire industrialized world’s education systems to the use of sight reading teaching methods (also known as whole word or whole language) for reading instruction, and the corresponding abandonment of the use of phonic instruction that built reading skills from the blending of letter sounds.
The dean of dyslexia, Dr. Samuel Orton himself, wrote an article way back in 1929 titled “The ‘Sight Reading’ Method of Teaching Reading, as a Source of Reading Disability.” In that article he said that “the sight method not only will not eradicate a reading disability… but may actually produce a number of cases.” In this statement he presaged Dr. Thomas Armstrong who in 1987 coined the term “dysteachia” to describe what the problem underlying dyslexia really was.
Dr. Orton conceded in 1929 that “…“sight reading” may give greater progress when measured by the average of a group [but] may also prove a serious obstacle to educable children who happen to deviate from the average…”. But that concession is unnecessary today. What we now know (and what I suspect Orton already knew but dared not write) is that sight reading doesn’t work for anyone.
The reason it looks as if sight reading instruction works to at least some extent is that up to 70% of children figure out some semblance of reading for themselves when exposed to print materials without actually being taught to read. Some children may figure out the alphabetic code, or can grasp it and put it to use as long as they are given just an introduction to the code, which might come from a teacher who sprinkles a little phonics in with sight reading, or from a parent or other source. Others learn to read pictographically, that is, they learn to recognize words as whole entities with no capacity to use the alphabetic code to decode new words that they have not memorized.
In other words, most kids who seem to be learning to read from a teacher are actually teaching themselves, or they are learning to fake it. The teacher might as well be doing handstands for all the impact s/he is having on the reading ability of these students.
While the lack of effective teaching methods is no worse than irrelevant for many children, for at least 30% the lack of effective teaching is disastrous. These kids do not “get” reading on their own, and require systematic, sequential phonics instruction and intensive practice with phonics to learn to read. Therefore, putting children into whole language classrooms is a gamble – nothing more, nothing less.
And unfortunately, almost every classroom is a whole language classroom, in public education systems throughout the industrialized world, especially where English is spoken. Despite its proven inefficacy, whole language remains the dominant method of reading instruction in public schools. Although the public education system sometimes seems fragmented and at loggerheads, on this issue it is seamlessly united. Whole language has been enabled by ministries and school districts; it has absolutely flourished in university education faculties, and it is akin to a holy grail in teachers’ unions. There is not room here to explain why this is the case, but for parents of children who are not learning to read, the “why” may not matter. Mainly, it is important to understand that they are not being taught.
OK, so they haven’t learned to read. Does that make them dyslexic? As far as I understand the literature to date, not right away. It seems that a child who has dyslexia is a child who has not been taught to read but, being in school, is expected to have learned to do so and is put into situations where reading is required. Such a child develops coping or compensating strategies, basically alternate methods for information intake, and eventually actually develops alternative pathways in the brain for coping with printed words. The more the child is asked to use them, the more established those pathways become, while the neural pathways that competent readers use to convert letters to sounds are never developed. At this point the untaught children might fit some sort of an objective definition of a dyslexic. The situation can be complicated when children respond to their confusion by some sort of acting out, usually to vent frustration or divert attention from their inability to read, that makes them more difficult to teach and which may generate additional labels such as ADD.
The more entrenched these behaviours and compensatory pathways become, the more difficult the task becomes of instructing them properly. However, it is important to emphasize that there is nothing different about these children until a step is missed in their instruction and their mind has to work around that omission. It is only if a teacher does not check his or her work for such omissions and correct them that the child’s brain has to begin the process of developing crude tools of its own. As they are moved on to successive work, and successive grades, their tools prove increasingly inadequate, but the children become all the more habituated to them.
In short, then, a non-reader who has never been asked to read is not dyslexic. But a non-reader who has had to function for some time in a reading environment becomes dyslexic by virtue of the coping strategies he or she develops. Dyslexia is a created, not inherent, condition.
The question does arise whether that 30% of children needing sequential instruction has some pre-existing brain difference that does differentiate them from the other two groups of children who can figure reading out for themselves. I am not aware of any prospective studies that have been done to ascertain this, but there have been some suggestions, among them in Orton’s original work, that something like this might be the case in 2-3% of children. Whether that difference, if it exists, is genetic or cultural (nature or nurture) is not clear.
Two important things are clear enough, however. One is that with aggressive enough instruction in the use of the alphabetic code, even that 2-3% can learn to read. Furthermore, such children should be easy to identify in the first few reading lessons of their school careers if their teacher is testing the efficacy of his or her instruction.
The key point is that there is no reason for any child to be excluded from the literate world. Some people may do this by choice, and humanity may yet evolve back to a non-literate state (and might even be the better for it). But children growing up in a still-literate society should not be co-opted into spearheading that initiative, especially not without parental permission.
Expanding the Dyslexia family
Sight reading and dyslexia were well-entrenched when it became unfashionable to rigorously teach handwriting, and in due course the disorder of dysgraphia, or an inability to write, came into being. And as the idea of letting children figure reading out for themselves became received wisdom, it occurred to someone to let children figure out arithemetic by guess as well, so now we have dyscalculia. And in the wake of open-area classrooms, non-linear seating arrangements, “teacher as guide on the side, not sage on the stage,” the belief that creativity is the end purpose of education, the elimination of right, wrong, win, and lose from the education lexicon, and the idea that a stimulating learning environment was one that offered constant visual, auditory, and social overload, ADD and ADHD and now CAPD have emerged – in the latter, children are supposedly unable to distinguish important relationships and communications from ambient noise. (To the extent that these ridiculous trends have also permeated the home environment, the epidemic of alleged disorders may reflect the home environment as well as the school. In such a case, parents may be rendering their children more vulnerable to becoming labelled by the school system).
If this pattern of disabilities emerging where none previously existed is not enough proof that predominant teaching methods are prejudicial to learning, the relative ease with which learning disabilities can be made to disappear is perhaps more convincing. Orton himself, again, made the point in 1929 that learning disabilities can be made to disappear just as readily as they appeared – with the use of more logical teaching methods. He is remembered today primarily for his part in the development of the Orton-Gillingham method, which can do just that. The reversibility of these “disabilities” reinforces the point that there really isn’t an actual disability there to start with.
Labelled with learning disabilities: what parents can do
The trick for parents of children who have not learned to read (or write, or whatever) in school is to find the remedial teaching that will overcome and break the habits the child has now developed when confronted with the task (reading or writing or arithmetic) that they have not been taught to do. More challenging still, such instruction often has to be delivered through the buffer of off-putting behaviours that such a child has developed to evade detection of their inabilities.
Understandably, since to offer extensive remediation opportunities would be akin to admitting their own failure, most public school systems do not have much to offer children who are victims of failed teaching. The best they can usually offer is assessment by a psychologist and some accommodation of the “disability” such as technological assistance, which is not the same as remedying the problem and really just reinforces it, since it keeps the brain functioning in alternate coping mode rather than retraining the brain to approach reading or writing correctly.
What the school system will also do is use such children as a statistical reason to reduce class sizes. The problem is that being in a smaller class with a teacher who still teaches ineffectively isn’t going to help children who haven’t been taught the skills they need in order to do the work placed before them.
There are also special schools and tutoring services which are, predictably, heavily patronized by parents of children who have not been taught their basic skills. But not everyone can afford these extra services, nor does everyone have them within geographic reach. Even more of a problem is that, after a century of compulsory schooling, we are not accustomed to being active consumers of education services.
It can be intimidating when an institution that you trust labels your child with a clinical syndrome and tells you that the child requires an expert with special skills to overcome it. Many parents are paralyzed in a state of waiting for the school system to provide those experts to “fix” their children. But the truth is that the special teaching skill most often required is to just patiently proceed through a series of exercises designed to augment the flaws in the child’s previous teaching. It takes persistence and some tolerance for boredom, but it doesn’t necessarily take huge expertise or a lot of money.
Parents should never underestimate their ability to do something themselves to help their children overcome whatever difficulties they have. If you know the letter sounds and the rules of pronunciation, you can teach them to your child. If you can write or print, you can train your child in letter formation on paper, in the air, or in sand. If you can tell time on an analogue clock (that’s one with hands!) or make change with coins, you can teach your child fractions and other arithmetic functions. It’s not rocket science. Keep in mind that you taught them to dress themselves and to eat with utensils – and consider it equally within your reach.
There are children whose deficiencies defy parental correction, and many badly taught children may do better with a trained remedial teacher, but if you can’t get a tutor, and you're the only option your child has, there is probably a lot you can do with a half hour per day and tools you already have around the home.
Many parents, and indeed many remedial teachers, prefer to use programs that divide instruction into lessons and exercises and thus lay the teaching process out in logical steps. These programs may also test children to assess the level at which they should be taught. Programs like this, sometimes available as books or packages of lessons, can be used as a supplement to ongoing schooling, or they can form the basis of a homeschooling program (Never rule out simply removing your child from school, as the environment can be so toxic that it does harm. Even if you can’t offer a cure yet, you can remove them from the source of ongoing harm).
The biggest challenge for parents is to distinguish useful information from useless information, and programs that will help from programs that will exacerbate the problem. Here’s a hint: reading, writing, and arithmetic are simple skills that are acquired through sequential introduction followed by practice that brings the child to fluency and automaticity. You are looking for program descriptions that reflect this basic, mundane reality, so you are looking for ideas like sequential, logical, methodical, systematic, or progression. If you see a lot of hype, or references to fun, excitement, discovery, creativity, and the love of reading or the magic of math, you’re probably best to move on to another source of information. The latter is, after all, the approach that has probably failed your child at school. There has even been a program at some libraries in Ontario where dogs are brought in to sit with children while they read, ostensibly improving the children’s literacy skills. I’m not kidding. Parents should apply “buyer beware” principles even to the selection of education, and should not be allowing their children’s time to be wasted with programs like this.
A particular word of caution is perhaps warranted on the subject of reading instruction done on the computer. Generally speaking, reading and writing are pencil-and-paper skills, and trying to learn them on a screen with a keyboard is at best indirect learning, and at worst counterproductive. Keyboarding is certainly a worthy skill, and children today would be out of step with their time if raised to be technologically inept, so avoidance of the computer and computer games is probably not warranted. However, reading is not a computer game. A teacher who can HEAR a child’s answer and either correct it or approve it is a necessary component of effective instruction. A parent can be that teacher, but a computer cannot. And even if a computer could, your child’s emotional and social development will be much better served by having that interaction with a human than with a computer.
What you want is active, not passive, work that your child can do, with your help and guidance, to actively build their skills. It may be difficult to find the method, and it may be difficult to find the time and to persevere, but parents should never believe they are powerless to help their children. That would perhaps be the most disabling condition that a child can have.
Edited by Karin Litzcke (12/06/07 10:21 AM)
Edit Reason: because grammar matters
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The Schools We Need
