Joe Torgesen, Barbara Foorman, and Richard Wagner of the Florida Center for Reading Research published an excellent overview of dyslexia that is readily available for public download. Although the title, “Dyslexia: A Brief for Educators, Parents, and Legislators in Florida,” makes it sound as if it is only applicable to people in a specific geographical area bounded by arbitrary marks on maps, this paper will be useful to millions of people.
In the document, Torgesen and his eminent colleagues address questions such as these: What is Dyslexia? What type of instruction is most effective for students with dyslexia? and Can reading difficulties in dyslexic students be prevented? How effective is remedial instruction for older students with dyslexia? The writing is clear as well as clearly well-informed.
This document will be valuable to people in PreK-12 schools, students studying education and the professors who should be teaching them the contents of the document; parents who are seeking straight talk with the authority of firm scientific underpinnings; and advocates who can benefit by distributing a tightly reasoned and written document to help explain concepts to constituents.
Snag a free copy from the Florida Center for Reading Research.
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After hearing Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition perpetuate the myth that individuals with dyslexia suffer from reversals, I submitted the following comment via the NPR Web site.
Dear Mr. Inskeep,
I was sorry to learn that you have the mistaken idea that the Learning Disability called dyslexia is characterized by “seeing things backwards.” I was even sorrier to hear you communicate this misinformation during an interview about dyslexia and entrepreneurship on 26 December.
Even though it persists among people who have not examined the research about it, the idea of reversals has been shown to be false in multiple scientific studies. To be sure, individuals with dyslexia make more reversal errors (read “was” as “saw”; confuse b and d), but that is simply because they make more errors overall; the ratio of reversal errors to total errors is the same among individuals with and without dyslexia.
I hope you can correct the misinformation that you passed along to to the large listenship of Morning Edition.
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Division for Learning Disabilities
http://TeachingLD.org
For those who didn’t know or have forgotten, this is not the first time I’ve fretted about the accuracy of NPR’s coverage. For previous posts on this subject, see here (and see an earlier post about NPR’s coverage of Mel Levine).
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Reading fluency
Among the fab five components of reading—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—different aspects have seemed to be in the spotlight at different times. Of course, this is just my subjective view, but it seems to me that there was disproportionate focus on comprehension in the ’80s and early ’90s, then on decoding in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Recently, it seems that everyone’s talking about fluency.
Although I think that a disproportional focus on fluency is a mistake (more on that in a later paragraph), I thought it would be beneficial to have some resources here on LD Blog about reading fluency. So, I’ve assembled a few recommended links here:
One of the reasons that we have to be careful about a disproportional emphasis on fluency is that we don’t want to communicate to learners that reading speed and accuracy, even including prosody, are all there is to reading. That is, fluency is just a means to the end of finding the ideas that the text conveys. This should be the idea of “balanced reading,” in my view. To be sure, fluent decoding is critical, but teacher have to shift the emphasis from the early stages when they are showing students how to unlock the coded material to the should-come-soon stages of comprehending the coded content.
Although it may sound like I’m playing with words, I am not. As strongly as I advocate for teaching early decoding skills efficiently and effectively, I don’t want readers to think that I consider decoding the end in itself. More on this another time… it probably deserves a page and perhaps it belongs on Teach Effectively rather than here on LD Blog.
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