J. B. Holmes overcame dyslexia to advance through college before quitting school to begin pursuing a career as a golfer, according to Damon Hack writing in the New York (NY, US) Times. Mr. Hack leads with an illustration of a bad shot Mr. Holmes made when practicing as a youth and connects this to his difficulty with completing school work.
Holmes’s [golf practice] sessions were born of a love of golf, but also a dread of going inside to do homework — the letters of some words would flutter around the page.
Holmes, a rookie on the PGA Tour, said he thought he was dumb. His parents went on the premise that he simply was not concentrating.
The extract I’ve included here illustrates both the good and the not-so-good in Mr. Hack’s story. The good? That’s the latter part that sets up this important point: Mr. Holmes’ problems were not because he was dumb or didn’t pay attention.
The bad? The implication that reading problems cause or are caused by perceptual problems, by distortion of letters and words. Later in the article this notion is furthered by quotations attributed to Amy Craiglow, Mr. Holmes’ academic counselor at the University of Kentucky. Ms. Craiglow said that Mr. Holmes was helped by exercises that encouraged him to visualize meanings for words and by placing “diagrams, stickers or note cards around a room and picturing the words in space.”
As well-intentioned and heart-warming as stories such as this one may be, they set us back in our efforts to provide a clear, accurate picture of Learning Disabilities. There may be cases in which visualizing images associated with printed words may actually help people with reading problems, but I suspect that they are few—probably fewer than 1 in a 100,000 dyslexics, I’d guess. Help is more likely to come from systematic, explicit instruction in learning the mapping between print and spoken language. Each report of a mysterious, magic-key solution to dyslexia dilutes the potency of what we know provides the best hope for treatment.
Link to Mr. Hack’s story (free registration required). Meanwhile, congratulations to Mr. Holmes for overcoming his problems and succeeding.
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Hi John, hey, isn’t the visualization at the heart of
http://www.lblp.com/programs/conceptimagery.shtml
“The Nancibell® Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking® (V/V®) successfully stimulates concept imagery. Individuals become able to image gestalts which include color, and even movement. This improves their language comprehension, reasoning for critical thinking, and expressive language skills.
It is common for individuals to gain years in language comprehension in four weeks of intensive instruction. “
Indeed, Liz. Good point. I remember Bell’s article in the Annals in the early 90s. I went to check it at the Lindamood-Bell site (link to pdf) and, as I recalled, it reported no experimental, quasi-experimental, or pre-experimental data. It would be this sort of research that would be needed to demonstrate a clear benefit from imagery generation, a al Nanci Bell’s theory.
When I searched PsycINFO for peer-reviewed, experimental research about imagery and reading comprehension (ruling out anything to do with music), I got no hits. When I loosened the constraints, I got more (mostly dissertations and theory articles). There were a couple of interest, though. Here’s the reference to a positive example.
Center, Y., Freeman, L., & Robertson, G. (1999). The effect of visual imagery training on the reading and listening comprehension of low listening comprehenders in Year 2. Journal of Research in Reading, 22, 241-256.
I didn’t have time to get through the entire set of abstracts, so the jury’s got to be out on this one until someone can conduct a review. If there is a strong core of studies on the benefits of imagery, I’ll be pleased to note it. So far, I’ve missed it in my routine scans of the literature.
If there is a convincing body of evidence, that’d be great. However, I’d still hope we would exercise caution in exanding on the use of imagery beyond the ways in which it’s been shown to be effective. I’m very wary of folks over-generalizing.
Here’s a great example (perhaps a tad hyperbolic): “Ahh, research shows that phonological awareness is related to reading and that improving phonological awareness is associated with improved early reading outcomes. Let’s teach all the PA we can…rhyming, segmenting, phoneme counting, sound isolation, phoneme deletion, blending….” The problem with this approach is that there are really only two phonemic awareness tasks (segmenting and blending) that really matter; teaching others is wasteful. Furthermore, often the activities used to teach skills and concepts are far removed from what’s been shown to be effective.
So, let’s hope that Ms. Craiglow’s instruction was predicated on evidence and hewed close to the procedures that were studied. Perhaps Mr. Holme’s success was caused by her efforts. Regardless, it’s great that he achieved well.