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Image vs. Reality (Essays in Frustration)

I maintained my interest in reading, occasionally helping neighborhood kids who had “problems.” This led me to a tentative conclusion that, in at least some instances, dyslexia was learned behavior, developed by trying to read whole words without knowing the names or order of the letters involved.

Comments On Dyslexia

January 18, 1992

The Editor
New York Times

For years, people expert in such things have said that dyslexia is caused by “minimal brain damage,” while minimal brain damage is proven by the existence of dyslexia. This, of course, has certain logical difficulties; some of us who have had to deal with reality have discovered to our surprise that dyslexia is learned behavior, and can often be unlearned with a modest amount of effort. Now the Times (Jan. 16, page A18) reports a study which shows that dyslexia is not, as the experts had thought, permanent, but sometimes vanishes where it had been detected earlier and appears later where it was not seen before.

Obviously, many children have discovered, probably unconsciously, how to unlearn the dyslexia they have been taught by “conventional instruction,” while others, trying to appease their conventional instructors, have fallen prey to its effects. Perhaps instructors, both conventional and unconventional, should consider NOT teaching dyslexia in the first place.

This can easily be accomplished by first having children memorize the names of the letters in alphabetical order, and then learn to identify the shapes of letters, both upper and lower case. When the alphabet is mastered, reading should then be based on identifying combinations of letters, identifying the letters by name, one by one, from left to right. This operation is called “spelling,” and is the inverse of another useful skill called “writing,” the act of putting letters on paper in the right order to make words.

This close relation between reading, spelling and writing has eluded those who employ conventional instruction; rather, they feel that, because b, d, p and q are too hard for students to learn to differentiate, reading should be based on whole words, guessed from “context clues”; that is, one assumes the “meaning” of the passage, possibly by looking at associated illustrations, and deduces what the words must be. Kids are pretty quick, and can easily learn to tell the difference between “through” and “cat” (the latter is shorter), but differentiating between through and thorough is much more difficult, particularly if you are told NOT to go letter by letter. Of course, the only way you can write a word is letter by letter, so writing is put off until later and made part of a separate course; even then, parents are encouraged to keep children away from typewriters (and computers) which work a letter at a time.

It is surprising how many common words kids can learn to identify as wholes, like helmet symbols for football teams or coats of arms sported by medieval knights, but there are just too many words for this to be a reliable method. “Limited vocabulary” books, prepared by proponents of conventional instruction, are devised to make reading progress appear to exist, but changing to books from another publisher, where a different limited list has been selected, demonstrates the nature of the problem quite clearly. There are, of course, only 26 letters and, even with upper and lower case, anyone except those engaged in conventional instruction would suppose that differentiating among them would be somewhat easier than among twenty or thirty thousand words.

When one tries to help a supposedly dyslexic child, an approach I have found useful is to have the child read aloud; if the child cannot identify a word or reads one incorrectly, ask him or her to spell it out. Chances are, the child will ask “what do you mean?” Respond with “say the names of the letters, one at a time, from left to right.” It sometimes takes a while to get used to this concept, but the look of startled joy that appears on the child’s face when proper identification of the letters makes the word obvious is a most pleasant reward. I use the rule, “When in doubt, spell it out,” to encourage this approach when reading alone.

My guess would be that many children deduce the relation between spelling and reading, and use it to overcome their supposed dyslexia. But those who try to please the teacher with whole word identification as the number of words mounts are in for trouble. Maybe some of the experts might want to check this out.

Very truly yours...

The Times decided to pass this one up.

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