A label in search of a disease
What does the term "dyslexia" actually mean?
Quite frankly, I am not sure what the term dyslexia means, and from the voluminous scholarly literature on this topic, it’s clear there is little consensus about its meaning there, either.
After earning a doctorate in Reading Education from the University of British Columbia in 1981, I spent twenty-eight years teaching at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta as a Professor of Education. I taught a variety of courses including Elementary Language Arts, Children’s Literature and Corrective Reading and wrote two books on Christian approaches to teaching the language arts of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Sometimes, a student would ask to write an exam on a computer with a spell checker and be given more time “because I’m dyslexic.” When I asked such students what they meant by labelling themselves as dyslexic, they would say something like, “I’ve always had trouble with reading and spelling.” When I’d ask why they didn’t just say that, they would reply, “Well, that’s what dyslexia means, isn’t it?”
I believe that it is not helpful to label people with a fancy-sounding, quasi-medical term without conclusive evidence that the label describes a real phenomenon with diagnostic criteria agreed upon by experts. The Literacy Dictionary of the International Reading Association defines dyslexia as “a developmental reading disability, presumably congenital and perhaps hereditary, that varies in degree from mild to severe” (my italics).
A short history
The origin of the word dyslexia comes to us not from educators and reading specialists, but via ophthalmologists and physicians who, at the beginning of the 20th century, drew attention to individuals who could not read and coined the term “congenital word-blindness.” In the 1920s, Samuel Orton, a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, dropped the term “word blindness” in favour of “strephosymbolia” (twisted symbols). This label was later changed to “developmental dyslexia,” a term still widely used today. The origin of this word is dys = bad; lexia = speech. Orton concluded, with little direct neurological evidence, that dyslexia was a functional brain disorder characterized by the failure of one brain hemisphere to become dominant in the control of language.
Marketing remediation
Orton and his colleague Anna Gillingham developed a commercial remedial training program called (not surprisingly) the Orton-Gillingham Method. Their painstaking method is based on the supposition that words are made up of letters that represent distinct sounds and that reading is primarily a matter of learning these letter-sound relationships. The method requires a student to memorize a large number of phonics “rules” to apply to ”word attack skills.”
One problem with this approach is that spoken English has about 40 phonemes (sounds that make a difference to meaning), but the English alphabet has only 26 letters. Thus, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds of English and the symbols (letters) that we use to represent these sounds. Canadian literacy expert Frank Smith has estimated that over 200 phonics “rules” (and the exceptions to them) are needed to account for the pronunciation of just one thousand of the most common single-syllable words in the English language. The Orton-Gillingham Method (and its many variations) is still popular today. This is disconcerting since such programs tend to view most reading problems as neurologically based when, in fact, the evidence for this is very inconclusive.
Dyslexia research
A number of years ago, Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko, researchers from the University of Durham in England and Yale University in the USA, published a landmark book, The Dyslexia Debate. The book is a synthesis of dyslexia research that concludes with a 75-page listing of over 1,260 individual citations. The conclusion of the authors is that “the number of definitions of dyslexia can be roughly equated with the number of theories of dyslexia and, in practical applications, also roughly equated with the number of commercially available interventions designed to remediate reading difficulties said to be caused by dyslexia.” Noted Canadian reading researcher, Keith Stanovich, in his review of the book, has concluded that the scientific evidence shows “no term has impeded the scientific study of reading, as well as the public’s understanding of reading disability, as the term dyslexia.”
Remedial teaching
While some students may suffer from neurologically based reading (and spelling) difficulties, their numbers are few and diagnosis is extremely difficult. It would be better for teachers to describe as clearly as possible what reading problem(s) particular students exhibit without attempting to attach a specific (and often unhelpful) label to them. Such labels often limit students’ self-perception in their own (and others’) eyes while providing little useful information for addressing their real reading concerns.
What then should one do for the students who exhibit serious reading problems? Good remedial teaching is simply good teaching done more intensively with one or a few students. The danger in remedial teaching is an over-reliance on just one instructional technique instead of attempting to discover what strategies the disabled reader is (and is not) using and then designing learning activities that complement strengths and ameliorate weaknesses.
Most struggling readers are discouraged learners. Because it is natural for humans to avoid unpleasant and unsuccessful experiences, poor readers avoid the very activity that will make them better readers – that is, reading. The greatest challenge of any teaching, but especially of remedial teaching, is to banish the fear of failure and ridicule. Where there is fear, there is seldom any good learning. Good teaching, then, is first about love, for “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18).
Using diagnostically unclear labels like dyslexia is decidedly unhelpful and masks the fact that there is still much we do not understand about the amazing human acts of reading and writing. Successful remedial teaching of reading requires a combination of compassionate motivation and a skillful understanding of the complex nature of learning to read.
