LD Blog

1 Response to “Lotsa Liz”

1. 1 Liz Ditz
   16 January 2007 at 7:21 pm

   Thanks for the link–sitting around waiting for a kid is much more productive now that there’s ubiquitous wireless. Thank [$deity] she gets her driver’s license back tomorrow. It’s been a long month.

   John, I have a question: why does Zig think dyslexia is a myth, or in KdeRosa’s words, “a junk diagnosis”?

   It makes me a little irritable…but of course it is my ox, or more properly, my daughter’s ox, that is gored.

   I don’t disagree with Engelmann’s fundamental premise (correct instruction, given at sufficient intensity, would dramatically improve reading across the board).

   I think of a certain young lady. She applied for admission to a school for gifted and talented students when she was four years, one month old, which required an IQ test for admission. This was before she had had any formal tuition in reading. The scatter in the subtest scores was remarkable (and I sure wish I’d known then what I know now!).

   This young lady benefitted from extensive remediation beginning in second grade with a scientifically-grounded program. But deficits in language processing remain.

   Examples: difficulty with accurate rendition of polysyllabic recall: after only having read “proprioception” pronounce it as prioproception. On looking at a poinsettia, calls it “that parenthesis plant”. This young lady, in handwritten work is just as likely to produce deitary for dietary or nulcleus for nucleus. Yes, she can recognize the error afterword, and she recognizes that they are two different kinds of errors. (Interestingly, she is much less likely to make those kinds of errors while keyboarding–the automaticity of the keyboarding is perhaps better than the automaticity of handwriting.)

   So this young lady’s issues are because she didn’t have Direct Instruction beginning in kindergarten?