[senco-forum] Dyslexia in the Genomic Era

I agree.  But how is "severely" defined?  a 12 year old girl in one of my
classes decoded beautifully with a low IQ.  For example when asked to draw a
man she drew disconnected circles.  Her decoding was amazing, considering.
Yet she couldn't answer any questions on the text, not even direct ones as
opposed to inferential.

The skill of reading, while low level in its mechanics in terms of brain
function, is a complex, affair made of separately processed components.  The
trick with reading failure is to find out which bit is failing and sort that
out.  This only applies to the minority who have not learned despite
excellent teaching.  Solity found that was about 3% in his study with 12,500
children. (How big are our SEN registers????  And why?)

I have also found, on objective testing using the Woodcock Reading Mastery
Test (from Dyslexia Action) that phonic knowledge and application to
decoding (called word attack or the skill of decoding nonwords) can be held
entirely separately as a skill from single word reading.  One 9 year old boy
had a significantly higher score on nonword reading than on real word
reading after a year of work in the dyslexia unit.  That altered my teaching
patterns so I directed him to more text work through text to speech software
(Write:Outloud from Don Johnston) and he became a reader.

Another case was a boy who was well below his expected scores (as based on
IQ - his was measured at 119) in word attack, word identification and
passage comprehension.  After a year of teaching both his word attack and
word id had got to within expected levels for age and ability.  But passage
comprehension remained stubbornly low.  He was tested for visual processing
by Keith Holland, given vision therapy for below age expectancy eye
movements and moved on to reading age and ability relevant texts (great big
novels all 11 year olds enjoy) and left our unit.

Philppa

On 9/17/07, Maggie Downie <maizie2004 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> No, that's not what Philip is saying.  He is saying that if people were
> taught to read initially using the same methods that Shaywitz has
> demonstrated to be be effective in remediating reading difficulties
> (dyslexia) that they would not have developed the problem in the first
> place.
>
> Reading, in the sense of decoding the words  on the page, is a lower order
> skill and can be taught to anyone, regardless of 'IQ', unless they are
> severely cognitively deficient.  Zig Engleman's work on Direct Instruction
> has consistently demonstrated this.
>
> The children most of us encounter in mainstream education are rarely
> incapable of learning to read if the methods evidenced as being successful
> by scientific research are used.
>
> Maggie
>
>
>
> brian hepburn <hepburnbrian at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> So, what you're really saying is that dyslexia is the brain's way of
> excusing the fact that some people are too stupid to learn to read.
>
> Sounds about right to me.
>
> Brain> From: P.Macmillan at exeter.ac.uk> To: lucass at loretto.com;
> senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk> Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Dyslexia in the
> Genomic Era> Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:54:59 +0100> CC: > > At the risk of
> upsetting a great many of you. My body armour is on order > and should
> arrive soon so you had better be quick.> > Gallaburda's findings could
> reflect the fact that the brain has reorganized > itself to cope with the
> difficulty so it could be consequence as well as > cause. Work by Shaywitz
> in the US has shown that the brain changes how it > is organized in response
> to effective remedial action and this actually > alters its physical
> structure, remember the research that showed that taxi > driver's brains
> physically altered as a result of learning 'the knowledge'. > With the
> Gallaburda's work we do not know what instructional methods were > used to
> teach reading so it is difficult to come to any conclusions nor do > we know
> on what basis the label of dylsexia was
> applied. As to the genetic > component, there can be no gene for dyslexia.
> Reading has not been around > long enough to allow it to develop as a result
> of natural selection, what > may be passed on is a relative difficulty in
> segmenting speech and/ or > dealing with the perception of speech. Now to
> the genetic, Pennington's > data suggests heritability in some 20% of cases,
> what about the other 80% > where do they come from. As we have no idea how
> to fix the gene that lies > behind dyslexia, in other words a genetic fix is
> a long way off, perhaps we > should be expending more effort on finding ways
> to alter the learning > environment so that those so affected can better
> learn how to deal with > print.> > Philip EP> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Stuart Lucas" > To: > Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 5:44 PM>
> Subject: [senco-forum] Dyslexia in the Genomic Era> > > For slides on the
> above (nice and colourful!) go to> www.dyslexiascotland.org.uk > > > >
> Follow links
> to Conference and then to downloads (top of page) -> > > > Sorry do not
> have the accompanying info - but you can a conference pack!> > > > Enjoy> >
> Stuart> > > > > > ---> avast! Antivirus: Inbound message clean.> Virus
> Database (VPS): 000775-0, 16/09/2007> Tested on: 17/09/2007 17:54:05> avast!
> - copyright (c) 1988-2007 ALWIL Software.> http://www.avast.com> > > > > >
> ---> avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.> Virus Database (VPS):
> 000775-0, 16/09/2007> Tested on: 17/09/2007 18:55:00> avast! - copyright (c)
> 1988-2007 ALWIL Software.> http://www.avast.com> > > >
> _________________________________________________________________
> Celeb spotting – Play CelebMashup and win cool prizes
> https://www.celebmashup.com
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Are you a hoarder? Then you'll love Yahoo! Mail with unlimited storage.
>