I wrote most of this over a couple of days in the summer school holidays, and then thought I’d finish it when I got back, but of course didn’t. The recent Teaching Matters science of learning summit in Hobart this week got me mulling things over again, and spurred me on to finish…
I’m on Tassie’s beautiful East Coast, reflecting on the year gone. This time last year, “angry farmer literacy” was a trending item on Google Search, thanks to Fiona Blackwood’s national ABC story. I’d actually given Merchants of Illiteracy ‘wings’ over a month prior, and it was already causing a bit of a stir in local literacy circles, but the ABC story brought the issues to a wider audience. Since then, I’ve joined the board of Code Read Dyslexia Network, given a chat for Think Forward Educators, had the honour of having a blog post republished in MultiLit’s Nomanis, and started tutoring in literacy for a speech-language pathology service in Hobart.
That ABC story, in turn, was around a year after my older brother died of cancer. He was a panelbeater (the Tasmanian term for a car body repairer). He was a panelbeater because he wanted to be a mechanic, but the apprenticeship requirements for the mechanic’s course required a higher English attainment than he’d managed, so he did the next best thing that would allow him to work on cars every day.
Now that I know about dyslexia, I still couldn’t confidently hazard a guess if he would’ve been assessed as dyslexic or not and, ironically, his spelling was far better than that of many of the mechanics I’ve met in my life. His reading was quite solid, though careful and not what I’d call fluent, and featured inaccuracies. It never troubled him enough that he avoided reading aloud. I don’t recall him ever reading a novel, as a child or an adult, though he would sit down and read the paper, and articles on his phone.
He was certainly clever. In later life he returned to education to study engineering, and presented his maths teacher with a proof of pi that he’d independently developed after his interest had been piqued.
Panelbeaters work in toxic dusts, toxic fumes, toxic solvents, and toxic welding gases. He died with a ‘working diagnosis’ of melanoma (the specific type of cancer was never actually definitively confirmed), but there’s little doubt all that other good stuff he was working with would have helped with initiation and promotion of cancer. Did his English marks contribute to his early death? Possibly. Even if it didn’t, could it have? Definitely. Would he have been assessed as dyslexic? It makes no difference whatsoever, and it makes all the difference in the world. Let me explain…
Dyslexia is slippery
I think the first work in my more recent readings that covered dyslexia was Mark Seidenberg’s Language at the Speed of Sight, and despite reading several works since, his overall general conception of ‘noisy’ connections between phonology, orthography, and semantics, offers the most satisfying conceptual understanding of the presentations of dyslexia. What causes that ‘noisiness’ is still, very much, ‘the (contested) devil in the detail’.
On my reading, it seems the research is slowly converging on the position that dyslexia is simply the most impaired end of a spectrum of reading ability. Despite searching for ‘specific aetiology’ (a single medical cause) and a single ‘core deficit’, it seems increasingly unlikely these will ever be found, and given that we now know that comorbidity with other conditions such as DLD and ADHD is the rule with dyslexia, rather than the exception, one may wonder why we’d still hope to find a single core deficit.
Within the research, even the phonological deficit (suggested by some researchers – e.g. Snowling 2019 – as a universal deficit of dyslexia) is regarded by other researchers (e.g. Moll 2022) as neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of dyslexia. Dyslexia is increasingly seen as dimensional with multifactorial, probabilistic causes.
Another line of research inquiry is into the theory that dyslexia and a number of other developmental difficulties, are underpinned by a temporal processing deficit – a timing issue. This is an interesting idea which is far less influential, but has attracted some research attention and support. A timing-based intervention program that was developed on this research base has been dismissed by giants such as Kerry Hempenstall and Margaret Snowling as ‘no more effective’ than other literacy-specific interventions, which is a dismissal I find difficult to fathom (though certainly defer to in terms of practice). If a study showed that yoga for an aggressive breast cancer was as effective at slowing the tumour growth as chemo, I’d be wanting to know why, rather than citing that study to dismiss the yoga as ‘no more effective than chemo’. I can imagine these kinds of dismissals may be informed by a similar line of thought as the principle of proximal interventions being more effective than distal interventions, but to my mind that needs to be treated with some nuance as well. Insulin is an intervention that’s very proximal to reducing blood sugar in a diabetic, but a number of comparatively distal lifestyle factors may have been involved in the development of diabetes in the first place, and addressing these may have a more fundamental and lasting effect than insulin injections (that said, if I’m hyperglycaemic, give me the insulin first).
I’m personally keeping an open mind to the possibility that the currently dominant view of the phonological core deficit may not be the core deficit, or may itself even be symptomatic of another more fundamental deficit. Particularly fascinating to me is the finding that the arcuate fasciculus – the bundle of white matter linking Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area – is under-developed in dyslexics and over-developed in musicians, who typically have to be well-tuned to tempo. For now, I’m leaving my mind open to the possibility that this deficit may be an under-explored possibility.
A few decades ago, genetic research looked promising, and four candidate genes were identified as the likely seat of the genetic basis for dyslexia. Now we have access to the entire human genome, more recent research has scuttled that expectation (despite the very strong genetic basis of reading skill – accounting for around 70%). Genome-wide association studies have (so far) identified 42 sites that are implicated in dyslexic populations. Researchers expect this number will grow once their sample size of participants grows (for comparison, 200+ sites are associated with schizophrenia). Confounding the issue further, there are findings like the recent toxicology research that has noted an association between pollutants (e.g. chlorpyrifos – there’s still some of my uncle’s in his shed that I inherited, as an insecticide) and dyslexia. Another recent study found that dyslexics are weaker at recognising faces – a fascinating finding for both its apparent unrelatedness to a phonological deficit, and the fact that facial recognition and word recognition activate similar brain circuits.
There is also no solid ‘cut off’ point – on any of the battery of language, literacy, and executive skills tests likely to be employed in an assessment – by which a practitioner can diagnose dyslexia. Some may choose to consider deficits in terms of standard deviations from the norm and use that to inform their decisions (and the DSM-5 does suggest percentile ranges that may best indicate dyslexia), but ultimately the decision is up to professional judgement – which also includes judgement about the quality and quantity of instruction received. This is part of the reason for cited dyslexia prevalence rates varying amongst those working in the field, from 3% to 17% in the research literature, and through to 30% in ‘explainers’ written for public consumption by some researchers (e.g. Shaywitz).
So, is dyslexia even a thing?
There have certainly been (and still are) researchers and practitioners who regard a dyslexia diagnosis with skepticism, and others who think most of what presents as dyslexia is actually the result of poor instruction. In my own limited experience in a tier 3 setting, I am yet to encounter a child who does not show some progress via systematic, explicit instruction.
In my wildest conjectures, I have also wondered whether some (rare?) cases of dyslexia may ‘simply’ have originated from a category error in a child’s understanding. For example, it should perhaps be no surprise that fMRI doesn’t show brain activation patterns in a child akin to those patterns of an expert reader, if the struggling child has started from a position of not knowing the alphabetic principle, and instead tackled text for some time as though it were something closer to a logographic challenge. We certainly wouldn’t expect fMRI imagery of a flautist playing their instrument to be mirrored in the brain of a child who’s handed a flute without first seeing it played, and who then (reasonably enough) assumes it’s a piece of plumbing and uses it entirely differently – perhaps only percussively, or simply as a prod…
But the fact remains that some children find literacy acquisition more difficult than others – and some much more so – even in the face of quality instruction. Snowling makes a useful comparison with high blood pressure… how high is high enough to cause a problem? The arbitrariness of the definition (and indeed a number of possible causes and risk factors) doesn’t detract from the fact that it elevates risk of health issues, and high blood pressure is certainly “a thing”. So too is dyslexia.
I’m beginning to think a lack of response to intervention in spelling, rather than reading, may be a more useful indicator of dyslexia. I’m finding it’s relatively easy to shift the needle on reading, with diagnosed dyslexics, than it is on spelling. Rebecca Treiman conducted research showing a staggeringly high correlation between reading and spelling abilities of 0.96, but I’m not usually seeing that in my students. Once they crack the code, their reading takes off, leaving their spelling behind, and the spelling takes a lot more work to remediate. More on spelling later…
Where does this leave ‘dyslexia advocacy’?
In one sense, we dyslexia advocates can be seen to be a victim of our own success. By naming and medicalising dyslexia, it suggests dyslexics are categorically different from those who are not dyslexic. This can be useful for advocating for individuals with a diagnosis, but it can also create an ‘excuse’ for not being able to teach a child into literacy. It can also potentially undermine system-wide reform attempts by artificially dividing the ‘treatment’ afforded to dyslexics and non-dyslexics (some of whom may have missed out on a diagnosis due to what they, or their assessor, had for breakfast – such is the fuzziness of the diagnostic criteria).
For my brother, it should’ve made no difference whether he qualified for a dyslexia diagnosis or not – he should have received whatever instruction was required to enable him to read and write fluently and accurately. But it could’ve made all the difference in the world had he had that diagnosis, in terms of advocating for his needs (though, in reality, in our school system at the time, it almost certainly would not have made any such difference – and could easily have put him in the ‘too hard basket’). I actually think he was just someone who didn’t read for pleasure because he found other stuff more interesting, and therefore missed out on a lot of practice.
In my personal view, dyslexia is still a valuable – and necessary – label for those for whom literacy acquisition is a struggle despite high quality instruction, but not because these people are categorically different in their brain function, but because they live and struggle in a literate society. It is the struggling reader’s socially-constructed disability that warrants attention, in my view. If we lived in a society where knowledge transfer and recording of history was still occurring in the domain of oral language, dyslexia would not be a thing. It’s no coincidence that our knowledge of (and, more particularly, our historical knowledge of) acquired dyslexia in the West began in the late 1600s, following the Gutenberg press, and of developmental dyslexia, in the late 1800s; inability to read would’ve been largely unknown until print was widely available, and the means of easily recording such inabilities for distribution to wider audiences also wouldn’t have existed. Print creates the disability of dyslexia, in the same way that a society opting to communicate predominantly via musical notes, would create the very significant disability of tone-deafness. Those amongst us who can’t hold a note would be severely disadvantaged, while the pitch perfect amongst us would have knowledge at their fingertips (or earlobes).
Having been interviewed for the KPMG review of Tasmania’s Educational Adjustments Funding Model, it became clear to me that the reality of the system here is that in some schools, struggling readers typically require a diagnosis of dyslexia in order to receive funding adjustments. This was never intended to be the case; indeed, the model specifically includes allowance for an ‘imputed diagnosis’ where struggles are clear enough that they should be provided for without evidence of an actual diagnosis. But the fact that some kids have a diagnosis seems to have created an ‘arms-race’ where they’ll be prioritised, meaning that, in practice, if you want adjustments, you’ll need a diagnosis. Whether this is a consequence of prioritisation due to a limited bucket of funding, or prioritisation due to misinformation (i.e. an unnecessary gatekeeper has been created because people think a diagnosis is required when it’s actually not, and the funding is available regardless), I have not yet established, but I suspect it’s a combination of both.
The diagnosis of dyslexia is a very blunt instrument that should be wielded with care to avoid such unintended consequences, but rarely is. Ideally, systemic approaches to accommodations and adjustments would be replaced by structured approaches such as Response To Intervention; it should not matter whether you are dyslexic or not, you should receive whatever intervention you require to support you to become a literate member of society. Until that happens, the ‘dyslexic’ label is likely to be useful… to those who can access it.
Dyslexia advocacy will also continue to be important in terms of its role in educating people about the nature of the difficulties struggling readers and spellers experience. To a competent reader, the inability to decode, or to spell accurately, can seem quite otherworldly. A literate person has a hard time comprehending how the print doesn’t ‘just compute’ like it does for them (and it’s true, researchers have gone on to define “the universal brain signature for proficient reading” as the extent to which brain activity for print and speech converges – in the brain, reading is just like talking, for someone who can read well). This sense of apparent ‘otherness’ evoked in a highly literate person on encountering a dyslexic person, can be further exacerbated by the fact that literacy difficulties can occur regardless of intelligence, and the contrast between a dyslexic’s verbal discourse skills and their written skills can be stark. Being able to explain what we know about the cognitive profile of a struggling reader, how that will create difficulties in the complex neurobiological process of literacy acquisition, and what supports and accommodations can be used to help, goes a long way toward reducing the alienation created by that sense of ‘otherness’. In that sense, too, dyslexia is arguably best explained as the far end of a spectrum of literacy attainment difficulties (because everyone is on that spectrum) rather than suggesting dyslexia is something categorically different (therefore promoting ‘otherness’ and, potentially, alienation).
The gift of dyslexia?
This naturally brings me to another strategy that some dyslexia advocates have adopted – that of positing dyslexia as categorically different, but in a positive way: a form of giftedness. Dyslexia is often framed as co-occurring with creative, out-of-the square thinking.
My personal view on this is, ultimately, the jury (in terms of research) is out. It certainly seems to me that most research around dyslexia has been focused on the deficits, with very little having occurred around potential strengths. It therefore follows that we would be far more aware of deficits than strengths, and absence of evidence around strengths isn’t evidence of absence.
On the other hand, it seems to me that researcher Sally Shaywitz draws a particularly long bow with her ‘sea of strengths’ model, where she places dyslexic literacy challenges within a profile of strong creativity and ‘higher order thinking’, and I suspect she is one of the main sources of the ‘dyslexic gift’ narrative.
Anecdotally, a lot of the dyslexics I’ve met do tend to be ‘doers’ who get things done, and a room full of them working on a problem can indeed be a force to behold. It’s often said that the plural of anecdote is not evidence, but while that’s true, it’s actually a misquote and blurs the truth behind the original observation: evidence arises as a scientific progression from observation of a pattern someone has noticed and deems worth testing – it’s putting anecdotal evidence to the test that works toward scientific knowledge, one way or the other. It would be nice to see the ‘gift’ narrative, which continues to be supported by anecdote, specifically put under scientific scrutiny.
While some advocates focus on the ‘unexpected’ nature of dyslexia, a recent study of over 50,000 people self-identifying as having a dyslexia diagnosis showed a statistically significant negative genetic correlation between performance IQ and dyslexia. It also found other positive correlations between dyslexia and things like shift work, having zero or vocational qualifications, employment involving physical labour, and stress due to financial difficulties. This doesn’t sound too much like a gift, though it’s worth noting that a quick look at all of the 98 phenotypes examined shows that things such as ‘self-employed’, ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘works as a creative’, were not considered for correlations (despite phenotypes such as “morning/evening person” being considered). So, again, the anecdotally common dyslexic ‘gifts’ weren’t borne out by the research, but nor were they tested.
Yes, highly intelligent people can be dyslexic, but so can less intelligent people. Particular strengths associated with dyslexia, if they exist, are under-researched in comparison to deficits.
For most of the people I work with, dyslexia does not seem to be a gift. Their reading struggles have caused significant anxiety, for them and their families.
What of instruction?
Five months into working in this field, it’s become very clear that we know an enormous amount about the cognitive processes involved in literacy, but we know, comparatively, painfully little about how a great deal of that knowledge would best serve students in classrooms.
There are also ongoing debates within the research (because that’s how science works), but also suggestions of the same kind of social inertia at play in research as in education, though this is arguably less significant than the inertia within education.
An easy example of our lack of knowledge is around whether we should teach letter names to children. Or, perhaps more particularly, when, and to which children. Many researchers say we should teach them early (e.g. because: research shows it’s a good predictor of later reading success; it introduces the idea of a label that can apply to a set of items; it’s practically easier and more consistent to refer to a letter neutrally, by its name, rather than a phonetic function; letter names can be a proxy for the sounds in words – b in ‘beach’ – and may actually be the first linkages kids make to the alphabetic principle, even if misinformed; ‘guidance’ from a letter’s name – the /v/ in v – may even ‘bypass’ lack of phonemic awareness). Some say no (e.g. because: it can cause name-sound confusion – the flipside of b in beach; referring to a letter only by its primary sound representation may reduce cognitive load at a critical time in a child’s education; any predictive power it has for reading success could be due to it being a proxy for other things such as home literacy environment).
In a world where researchers know that individual line segments in a letter are processed by separate neurons, and can now accurately reconstruct something that was said to a test subject by taking surgically acquired neural recordings from the superior temporal cortex, not actually knowing whether we should teach letter names or not may seem bizarre. But the complexity of isolating the impact of teaching letter names from all the other potentially confounding influences children experience, is immense.
On the other hand, research is certainly going there (and has been for decades), and also looking at ‘item-level’ effects such as how one child’s ‘set for variance’ can enable the word “ghost” to be successfully recognised on first encounter, while another’s may not, with potentially different results again for “shoe”. How to make such granular research useful for educators is the translational problem Mark Seidenberg has been very vocal about.
Another obstacle to translation is entrenched positions. For example, here in Australia most practitioners aligning themselves with the science of reading are very familiar with Max Coltheart’s influential and beautifully elegant Dual Route Model of reading. Far fewer practitioners are aware of connectionist models of reading, nor that researchers tend to prefer connectionist models over the dual route model (nor again that the DRM was revised to try to incorporate some of the advantages of connectionist models). The stark difference between the dual route and connectionist models is that the former defines a lexical route of word recall (effectively access to an ‘internal dictionary’) while the latter does away with the internal lexicon. It can be a counterintuitive and quite challenging idea at first – that we have no ‘internal dictionary’ – but that is where the research is heading.
One practitioner I discussed this with thought it doesn’t really matter in practical terms, for instruction, but I feel the implications could be immense. For example, if it turns out that orthographic mapping is not actually happening at the word level and ‘storing’ that word as a whole, but rather storing something like data at a statistical-occurrence-of-constituents level, how might we best enable and harness that kind of learning? If the research is converging on a notion – no internal lexicon – that is counterintuitive to us, it seems highly likely that the most efficient way to instruct children within that model may also involve something counterintuitive – and perhaps as yet unimagined.
Within the science of reading movement, we practitioners are all for explicit instruction (and rightly so), but researchers know that most reading learning is done implicitly, once learners are out of the blocks thanks to explicit instruction. Where that boundary lies – and how best to teach to kids on either side of it – could conceivably be heavily influenced by what connectionist model researchers eventually bring to light.
As an aside, one problem with implicit learning that I’ve recently noticed myself, is that it’s, well, not explicit. In teaching vocabulary to kids, I have discovered an alarming number of words for which I only know – at the age of 50 – the basic ‘sense’ of the meaning of the word, which, presumably, I have deduced (sometimes poorly) from encountering them in context (I certainly didn’t stop to look up the meaning of every unknown word I encountered on reading Alice in Wonderland in grade 3).
For example, it was only when I had to define “cloying” for a child, that I discovered that it refers to excessive ‘sweetness’; I thought the repulsion element of cloying was due to excessive clinginess, not excessive sentimentality. I wonder now if that erroneous assumption was due to a phonological similarity with “clawing”. The word “stealth” is another… for decades I have thought “stealthy” means silent and fast (like an amalgam of silence and nimbleness) when it actually involves slowness. By the way, no, I never really enjoyed crosswords, which is probably part of my problem: I have deduced meanings from context, rather than encountering them alongside a defining ‘clue’.
Linnea Ehri’s phase theory of literacy development is another established touchstone of evidence-informed instruction, seemingly considered unassailable amongst practitioners, but researchers like Kemp and Treiman highlight that children demonstrate behaviours and knowledge that clearly violate the pre/early/later/consolidated alphabetic paradigm.
So, what do we know about instruction?
All the things that all the landmark national and international reports have been saying for decades, and have largely been ignored: structured, explicit literacy instruction is the most effective approach. Exactly what that is best comprised of, will be debated until civilisation collapses and we have no texts left to read.
My personal views, subject to (almost inevitable) change: should we teach letter names? Probably. Syllable types? Probably not, beyond the concept of every syllable having a vowel sound, and a few types to get the message across that pronunciation changes with open and closed syllables. ‘Advanced’ phonemic awareness? Only for those with an apparent deficit, and in combination with text where possible. Spelling rules? Definitely, but I prefer ‘patterns’. Morphology? As soon as they have enough GPCs under their belt.
I think one of the most understated facts in the literacy space is that reading is a skill that first requires declarative learning, but then requires procedural learning to reach fluency. The analogies between reading and other skills like playing a musical instrument or swimming are, I suspect, often seen as just loose analogies (or even more abstracted, like an allegory). But all those skills are really simply items in a list of procedural memory tasks, along with reading, and procedural memory tasks require repetition to reach automaticity. You need to teach kids the fact that “sh” represents the /sh/ sound, and that requires declarative learning. But to then to put that newly learnt knowledge into practice to build fluency, requires repeated procedural learning.
The dexterity of a musician’s fingers isn’t a natural occurrence, it’s trained through practice. Our eyes, equally, don’t scan lines of text naturally, it’s trained through practice. Processing letters as representative of sounds, morphemes as representative of meanings – it all takes procedural learning practice to make it fluent, once those concepts have been learnt by declarative learning. Some kids will be naturally faster at cementing those skills, but all require practice. You may as well warn against “drill and kill” when teaching a kid to play an instrument. Any practising musician will tell you talent will only get you so far, and it’s practice that separates the ‘could have beens’ from the successes.
Yes, we certainly could kill interest with drill, but if we do, that’s on us and our craft, and how we navigate the process by which the human brain best learns to get procedural memory tasks to automaticity.
How do you spell?
I had a conversation with a real life spelling researcher (exciting!) some weeks ago about why spelling seems to me to be so much harder to remediate. In discussing this, it became apparent that she and I spell differently.
She referred to the need to visualise a word with the graphemes in their correct order before translating that (effectively copying) to the page. This pulled me up short, because I don’t do that, at all. I don’t visualise words I’m going to spell. In fact, I feel like I can’t visualise more than maybe 5 or so characters of a word at once (and I’ve assumed that was something to do with the foveal span) – but even those few characters, I don’t visualise as a matter of course, when I’m writing. I feel like the page, not my mind’s eye, is my scratchpad. That’s where the ‘visualisation’ happens – in the actual seeing what I’ve written. It’s at that point that I think about whether it looks right or not. There is no pre-visualisation for me.
How about you?
I wonder whether good or poor spellers are divided over this strategy. Do spelling bee kids visualise the word? It makes sense that they would, because they don’t have paper to work with. But would that habit of visualisation then slow down their writing?
“Pitchforks for Parents”
Keep an eye out for this. Having watched the last year unfold, this is what I’d like to do next in terms of advocacy: equip parents to be able to identify the difference between balanced literacy practices and structured literacy, and have them understand why the difference is important.
I’d like to roadshow this so that all the parents who have a niggling feeling that something is not quite right with their kid’s reading, have the knowledge to be able to identify what isn’t right and to raise that with their school.
Let me know if you want in!