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Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/dyslexia-and-the-reading-wars/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18974

I’ve read a fair amount about the so-called Reading Wars over the years, but nothing as convincing as David Owen’s New Yorker article in the latest issue (archived). It starts:

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

Estimates of dyslexia’s incidence in the general population vary, from as high as twenty per cent—a figure cited by, among others, Sally Shaywitz, a co-founder of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity—to as low as zero, as suggested by Richard Allington, a retired professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who in 2019 told participants at a literacy conference that legislators who supported remediation for students with reading disabilities should be shot. Nadine Gaab, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me that the best current estimates fall between five and ten per cent.

There are reasons for the inconsistency. The condition varies in type, severity, and presentation of symptoms, and early literacy skills have historically been hard to measure. Many children with dyslexia (and their parents) never learn they have it. Because a common strategy for avoiding the embarrassment of reading aloud is to act in a way that results in being sent to the principal’s office, dyslexic students are often treated primarily as discipline problems. At every grade level, they are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or placed in juvenile detention, especially if their families are economically disadvantaged. According to a 2011 study of four thousand high-school students by Donald J. Hernandez, then a sociology professor at Hunter College, more than sixty per cent of those who failed to graduate had been found to have reading deficits as early as third grade. More often than not, schools don’t intervene effectively, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes as a result of misguided pedagogy, sometimes for fear of incurring instructional or legal costs. […]

Shaywitz, in her book “Overcoming Dyslexia,” cites an account, published by a German doctor in 1676, of “an old man of 65 years” who lost the ability to read after suffering a stroke. “He did not know a single letter nor could he distinguish one from another,” the doctor wrote. This was perhaps the first published description of what’s known today as acquired dyslexia, caused by damage to the brain. Two centuries later, a doctor in England wrote a paper about a case of what he called “congenital word blindness.” It involved a fourteen-year-old boy who was unable to read despite years of instruction by teachers and tutors. He could recognize “and,” “the,” “of,” and a few other one-syllable words, and he knew the letters of the alphabet, but when the doctor dictated vocabulary to him he misspelled nearly everything, writing “sening” for “shilling” and “scojock” for “subject.” His disability stood out, the doctor wrote, because his schoolmaster had said that he would be “the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral.”

Spoken language arose at least fifty thousand years ago, and the brain has evolved with it. As a consequence, most children learn to speak early and easily, without formal instruction. (Deaf children pick up signing readily, too.) Reading and writing are different. They were invented only about five thousand years ago, and natural selection has not configured the brain to facilitate them. “You can’t just lock a group of kindergartners in a library and expect them to emerge, a couple of weeks later, as readers,” Gaab told me. “It’s more like learning a musical instrument. You can listen to Mozart all your life, but if I put you in front of a piano and say, ‘Play Mozart,’ you will fail.”

To become literate, people have to repurpose parts of the brain that evolved to perform other tasks, such as object recognition and sound processing. “What we have to do, over the course of learning to read, is coördinate these areas to communicate with each other and build what we call a reading network,” Gaab said. The areas are connected by axon bundles, which she likened to highways. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book “Reading in the Brain,” writes, “Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?”

I could quote a lot more, but I’ll just urge you to read the whole thing; you may be as enraged as I was at the educators who refuse to believe that the methods they were taught have been shown not to work, and at the huge number of kids whose lives have been needlessly worsened. (To preempt an obvious and pointless derail: the wretched English spelling system is neither here nor there; to repeat a sentence from above: “Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese.”)

https://languagehat.com/dyslexia-and-the-reading-wars/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18974