Dyslexia is a Junk Diagnosis

According to KdeRosa, anyway:

I'm not convinced that dyslexia is a legitimate disease or handicap or whatever the en vogue euphenism is today. I view dyslexia like the other bogus ailment "specific leearning disability"-- an educator created problem designed to excuse ineffective teaching ability.

He relies upon Zig Englemann's response of the fMRI evidence

Download engelmanndyslexia.pdf

Englemann's arguments seem to me to be a misreading of the evidence, as does the author of the next piece DeRosa quotes:

Download emosthuogthsoondyslexai.pdf

The author demolishes the strawman argument that dyslexics see letters reversed.

Sigh.  Direct Instruction in reading works well for many, many kids, and is a great antidote to the whole-language nonsense.  However, for some kids, a multisensory approach, including direct instruction (note the lack of caps) is essential.

Here's Susan Barton on what dyslexia is, and how to remediate it.

One shouldn't regard a dyslexia program as "tutoring".   Parents should select a program that has been shown to work, that has the following features:

Effective Teaching to Remediate Dyslexia--These steps must be mastered in order!

• Phonemic Awareness is the first step. You must teach the student how to listen to a single word or syllable and break it into individual phonemes--the individual sounds.
• Phoneme/Grapheme Correspondence is the next step. Here you teach which sounds are represented by which letter(s), and how to blend those letters into single-syllable words.
• The Six Types of Syllables that compose English words are taught next.
• Probabilities and Rules are then taught. The English language provides several ways to spell the same sounds. For example, the sound /SHUN/ can be spelled either TION, SION, or CION. The sound of /J/ at the end of a word can be spelled GE or DGE. Dyslexic students need to be taught these rules and probabilities.
• Roots and Affixes
• Morphology

How it is taught: Simultaneous Multisensory Instruction: Sometimes we rattle this off and don't really explain what it means or why it is important

This can be confusing to parents
Sight or seeing, using the eyes = VISUAL
Hearing or listening, using the ears = AUDITORY
Feeling or touching, using the skin = TACTILE
Moving through space and time, using the whole body = KINESTHETIC

Reading and writing go together; writing is a kinesthetic task--(can you feel how all the muscles in your hand and arm work to form letters as you write a sentence?).

Dyslexic people who use all of their senses when they learn (visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic) are better able to store and retrieve the information. So a beginning dyslexic student might see the letter A, say its name and sound, and write it in the air -- all at the same time. 

Excellent instruction includes:

• Intense Instruction with Ample Practice: The dyslexic brain benefits from overlearning--having a very precise focus with lots and lots of correct practice.
• Direct, Explicit Instruction: dyslexic students do not automatically "get" anything about the reading task, and may not generalize well. Therefore, each detail of every rule that governs written language needs to be taught directly, one rule at a time. Then the rule needs to be practiced until the student has demonstrated that she has mastered the rule in both receptive (reading) and productive (writing and spelling) aspects. Only then should the instructor introduce the next rule.
• Systematic and Cumulative Many dyslexic students are not identified until later in their academic careers. They have developed mental "structures" of how English works that are completely wrong. To develop good written language skills--reading and writing--the tutor must go back to the very beginning and rebuild the student's mastery with a solid foundation that has no holes or cracks.
• Synthetic and Analytic: dyslexic students must be taught both how to take the individual letters or sounds and put them together to form a word (synthetic), as well as how to look at a long word and break it into smaller pieces (analytic). Both synthetic and analytic phonics must be taught all the time.
• Diagnostic Teaching the teacher must continuously assess their student's understanding of, and ability to apply, the rules. The teacher must ensure the student isn't simply recognizing a pattern and blindly applying it. And when confusion of a previously-taught rule is discovered, it must be retaught.

Comments

[Liz Ditz]

Correct links for KdeRosa's blog post:

http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2007/01/teachers-say-they-cannot-cope-with.html

[KDeRosa]

Liz, is there any properly conducted research showing that dyslxics receiving direct instruction plus a multisensory approach performed better than dyslexics receiving only the direct instruction portion?

I don't dispute that some kids have great difficulty learning to read, I just don't think that there is any credible evidence that there exists a medical condition that sets some of the kids apart from other kids who have difficulty learning to read. (Which is not to say that there exists rare conditions that do afflict some people.) I also thnk that Engelmann's point stands that the underlying causation behind the fMRI evidence has yet to be shown. Lastly, even the current accepted definitions of dyslexia lean toward the instructional deficits as opposed to a medical explanantion. I'd analogize it to calling alcoholism a disease: perhaps the doubletalk helps remove the stigma, and that may be a good thing, but the existence of the underlying condition remians elusive.