Is Dyslexia a Myth?

[updated September 9, 2005]  : the produce of the BBC program says,

We are not saying dyslexia is a myth, we are saying the popular conception of dyslexia is a myth and that dyslexia itself needs to be redefined in a much more rigorous way.

Julian Elliott, a professor of education at England's Durham University, has set off a fierce debate, at least in the UK.  I'm betting it will spread here.

He says there is no consensus about to define dyslexia and what diagnostic criteria to use. He says a “dyslexia industry” has grown up based in a spurious link between diagnosis and intervention. This leads to expectations that being diagnosed “dyslexic” is a signpost to recovery, and that dyslexia implies that someone is intellectually bright, in spite of their reading problems – which Professor Elliott says is not necessarily the case.

In the Times Educational Supplement,  Elliott wrote,

Contrary to claims of ‘miracle cures’, there is no sound, widely-accepted body of scientific work that has shown that there exists any particular teaching approach more appropriate for ‘dyslexic’ children than for other poor readers.

He is correct in some senses: there is no international consensus about diagnosis and effective treatment; there is  a "dyslexia industry"; there are a host of  unproven, expensive "treatments" (scroll down to the bottom for a register of the UK programs).

I'll be interested to see how the discussion develops.  So far it seems that people are reacting not to Elliott's actual point of view, but the spin reported in the press.

September 8th, the keynote speakers at the following conference are appearing in a  BBC Channel 4 broadcast: Dispatches: The Dyslexia Myth

Challenging the existence of dyslexia as a separate condition, it will reveal the scale and pain of true reading disability and show that even though hundreds of millions have been invested in the teaching of reading, the number of children with serious problems has hardly changed.

On Friday, October 21st,   the  Curriculum, Evaluation and Managment Center (CEM) of the UK is putting on:

The Death Of Dyslexia

A major conference for teachers, educational psychologists, Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs)  and anyone interested in children learning to read.

Some children find it extremely difficult to learn to read, and some never become proficient readers. This is a very serious problem, and one that is particularly acute for children learning to read English where spellings are often irregular. Despite enormous efforts aimed at raising standards in English schools through numerous Government initiatives costing hundreds of millions of pounds, too many young people still struggle to learn to read. Some of these children are deemed to suffer from dyslexia, a label that marks them out. Underpinning this is the belief that a diagnosis of dyslexia will point to particular interventions that can resolve an individual’s difficulties. There is, however, no clear evidence to suggest that we have a clear means of identifying such a distinct population, or that the labelled group should be treated differently from any other poor reader.

The word ‘dyslexia’ has become discredited through overuse, misuse and by unwarranted promises of cures. But all children who experience difficulty learning to read can be helped. Solid research tells us more about reading than any other facet of education. This knowledge needs to be much more widely disseminated and used so that we can lose the long tail of poor readers that has plagued us for generations.

The keynote speakers at this conference are participating in a Channel 4 documentary that also involves leading international researchers in the area of reading difficulty. This programme, which is scheduled to be televised in September 2005, closely reflects the theme of this conference in challenging common concepts of dyslexia, and in suggesting appropriate ways forward. The conference will provide delegates with the opportunity to hear of the very latest research findings through presentations from distinguished and experienced academics and researchers and also concluding remarks from the programme’s Executive Producer, who has spent several years on this project visiting leading specialists in research centres in both the UK and US.

Go here  to download the program.

Keynote Speakers:
Trevor Millum--Welcome and Introduction
David Mills --The Way Forward
Julian (Joe) Elliott --Why We Need to Stop Using the Term Dyslexia
Maggie Snowling--Redefining Dyslexia
Peter Tymms--The Impact of Government Initiatives on Reading

Breakout Sessions:

• Mary Hilton (Homerton College, Cambridge) -- A Can of Worms? Reading Test Results, Social Class, And Classroom Practice
• Christine Merrell (researcher,  CEM)-- Diagnostic assessment of reading in the primary years with Interactive Computerized Assessment System (InCAS)
• Peter Hatcher (lecturer, Center for Reading and Language, York University and developer of the phonological awareness program Sound Linkage) --Reading Intervention: Research to Practice
• Jonathan Solity (Warwick Institute of Education)--New insights into overcoming children's reading difficulties

Solity has criticized the current UK literacy teaching scheme for being flawed: it isn't accurate, and is difficult to teach.

The UK dyslexia industry:  Touting of such useless "cures" as the  Dore method (DDAT--see critiques  here and here and here);  Scotopic Sensitivity  (Meares Irlen---see critiques here and here and here and here);  Irlen Lenses and Hooked on Phonics; movement and dietary treatments (the Sunflower Method--see critiques here; Leona Bull's "research" was published in here in  Early Child Development and Care 172 (3) pp. 247-257(11) ) flashing lights (Brightstar, critique here)...the list seems endless.

Critiques of other "treatments" (all pages link to the excellent site maintained by the Tennessee Center for Dyslexia)
FastForWord
Larry Silver on DDAT
Dietary Supplements and Herbs for Learning Disabilities
Optometric and Vision  Training
The Davis Method
Colored lenses and overlays

Common myths about dyslexia
LD Blog on myths
LD Blog on letter reversals
Susan Barton's LD myths page
Dyslexia Center's dyslexia myths page
Meadowbrook Education Services dyslexia myths page
Agape Learning Center's dyslexia myths page

Educating education writers about dyslexia

Solid American resources:
Children of the Code

  Statistically, more American children suffer long-term life-harm from the process of learning to read than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined.  In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost our nation more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined. 

Index page of interviews from Children of the Code

In an interview, Louisa Moats says,

Every day I’m in a school and working with teachers, I continue to be astounded by the gulf of knowledge, the gulf between our knowledge base in the scientific community and the practices that go on in teacher training.....

One of the most common findings in my studies of teacher knowledge and teacher proficiencies is that even experienced teachers of reading really do not know speech sounds. If I ask them a simple thing like how many speech sounds are in the word ‘no’ and I spell it k-n-o-w, they’ll tell me there’s four speech sounds in the word because they don’t know how to separate their own knowledge of orthography from a specific awareness of speech sounds.

Children of the Code's interview with Sally Shaywitz, who used brain imaging studies to reveal that poor readers do not use portions of the brain that excellent readers use.

More links:
Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science
Teachers Not Prepared To Teach Reading
Ann Rickert: I Taught 1,000 Kids To Read, and Failed Hundreds

LD Online
Schwab Learning
Advocating for Your Children: Writeslaw
Susan Barton
The Greenwood Institute
International Dyslexia Association (IDA)
Jonathan Mooney and project Eye-to-Eye

I think it will take something as shocking as Elliott's assertion to move from the status quo to universal reading mastery.

More Info:

Introduction to the BBC Channel 4 presentation, by David Mills

As a current affairs producer, every story you tell brings surprises. No story I have ever been involved with before though has produced as many eye-openers as the Channel 4 Dispatches programme The Dyslexia Myth.

There were numerous small revelations: ranging from the discovery that dyslexic children do not reverse their letters any more than younger children reading at the same level, to the discovery that the Government has so far introduced no fewer than 650 different initiatives in primary schools.

Then there were even more dramatic discoveries: poor readers with high IQs, usually seen as dyslexic, respond in exactly the same way to help with their reading as poor readers with low IQs who are rarely labelled as dyslexic.

The biggest shock was that the 'dyslexia myth' story which sounded so controversial when I first started the research, turned out not to be controversial at all to the experts. The idea that the common understanding of dyslexia is a myth was startling when I first heard it. Yet I found it was a view shared by every academic that I talked to. The scientific consensus about it is overwhelming.

This poses two questions, both of which trouble me still, even though we did not deal with them in the documentary. I am raising them here in more detail. The first question is why has the story not been reported before? The second is what is the future of the term dyslexia?

Chris Treganza, a UK blogger, has more at his blog Myomancy.  I do not agree with Chris on the value of colored lenses, or balance training, as a primary intervention for dyslexia.  But go see what he has to say.

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Comments

[Chris Tregenza]

You can find more coverage and details of what was in the program on Myomancy

[Jane Evans]

Julian Elliott should try living with a child who wants to kill himself because he is being bullied for not being able to read and write.Dyslexia does exist very much so. My son now attends a school for specific learning difficulties and is a different child.Mainstream teachers need educating to help any child suffering but it is too often ignored. I had to fight to get my son statemented and people to listen which is wrong.