[While writing this, the NIFL-LD has been replaced by 
learningdisabilities at dev.nifl.gov.  I try posting to both!]


Hello Mary, Barbara, Anita, Anne, Robin,

Thanks to you all for your comments.  I think we are reaching some 
conclusions.

----------

1.  BRAIN PATTERNS

Mary S. Kelly, PhD writes:

"There is some evidence that brain patterns in dyslexia change as a result
of multisensory phonics instruction.  See Shaywitz and Shaywitz et al,
Neural systems for compensation and persistence:  Young adult outcome of
childhood reading disability, Biological Psychiatry, 2003, Vol 54..  See
also Shaywitz, Overcoming dyslexia (Knopf)"

I looked up some of the Shaywitz work, and it supports my hypothesis that 
there is a "good way" to read, and anybody can be taught to read this way. 
However, some people have a genetic factor, which makes it difficult to 
acquire the skill, and means that they have to practice to obtain fluency.

-----------

2.  IMPLICATIONS ON ADULT LITERACY

Barbara K. Given, Ph.D writes:

"From my quick overview of the respective websites, however, it appears that 
WordAloud follows a fairly traditional synthetic approach while Truespell 
resembles a more complicated version of the old international teaching 
alphabet (ITA) that failed substantially in the U.S. years ago. Are either 
of these assumptions correct?"

JN: That is correct as far as WordAloud is concerned.  I cannot speak for 
Truespell.

"Next, what I've missed in my cursory investigations of the respective 
websites are data re: the use of these approaches with adults. Are such data 
available?"

JN: I have only anecdotal evidence that synthetic phonic works for adults. 
But there are good theoretical reasons for believing that an intensive and 
structured course for adults could help them with a reading disability. 
Particular individuals may have different problems, which are hurdles to be 
overcome.  These problems have to be identified and worked on.

---------

3.  SIGHT WORDS

Anita Landoll writes:

" About the "sight words"... It seems to me that the
"natural reader" does fine with even the most
illogically spelled (in relation to its sound) sight
word. I have thought about why, and have come to the
conclusion that our brains decode the words to cause
them to make sense. Thus busy becomes b short i/z long
e/. Seems our decoding center just makes sense of the
word.
So, I think it is appropriate to help the struggling
student "do the decoding" to get from the written
spelling to the "sound spelling." And I think it is
important that it be possible to do the process with
any word the student needs to know in order to read
any text. "

JN: The experience from the Clackmannanshire study is that as decoding and 
blending of sounds becomes more proficient, the reader starts to recognise 
common words by sight, without having to "sound them out" in their own mind. 
Research also suggests that a proficient reader has two parallel pathways to 
meaning - one via sounding out the words, and one via whole word 
recognition.  For any given word, the meaning is obtained from the quicker 
pathway.  But for unusual and infrequent words, the "sounding out" route is 
necessary.

----------------

4.  SAME PROBLEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES

Anne Murr writes:

" Thanks Robin for such a thorough and enlightening posting.  I am
really late in joining this discussion.   But I want to give you this
reference which also supports Pugh's finding that the process of
reading is the same in any language and occurs in the same part of
the brain.

Paulesu, E., Démonet, j.-F., Fazio, F., McCrory, E., Chanoine, V.,
Brunswick, N, et al.  (2001).  Dyslexia:  Cultural diversity and
biological unity, Science, 291, 2165-2167.

This research identified dyslexics who spoke Italian, French and
English.  Brain scans taken while they were reading were compared to
the brain scans of proficient readers in the 3 languages.  The scans
for dyslexics across the 3 languages was the same --- but different
from the scans for proficient readers.  Good readers use the base of
the brain where vision connects to sounds and then to meaning.
Dyslexic readers have a smaller portion of brain activity at the base
of the brain (what is seen is processed) but the phonological
processing part of the brain is not activated.  Dyslexics have
greater frontal lobe activity --- where higher order thinking
occurs.  This confirms my observation that poor readers have strong
cognitive skills.  They just process words with difficulty. "

JN:  Thanks for that insight.  The dyslexics compensate for lack of decoding 
skill by involving "high order thinking".  I believe that this would be 
using intelligence to guess words from context.  This is the legacy of 
poor/inadequate teaching.  By compensating for reading problems, the brain 
pathways can be activated, see below.

------------

5.  COMPENSATING READERS


>From http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/yu-yri071503.php:


"These findings indicate the important role of experience in the proper 
development of the neural systems for reading and offer hope for teaching 
our most disadvantaged children how to read," said principal investigator 
Sally Shaywitz, M.D., professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of 
Medicine and co-director of the National Institutes of Health Yale Center 
for the Study of Learning and Attention.

Shaywitz said the study resolves a major question in reading disability: why 
some children compensate for their reading difficulties, while others 
continue to struggle to read. Brain activation patterns show a disruption in 
the neural systems for reading in compensated readers. The researchers were 
surprised to find that the neural circuitry for reading real words is 
present in persistently poor readers, but has not been properly activated.

"Reading is the most important work of childhood and yet, as many as one in 
five children struggle to learn to read, with consequences extending beyond 
childhood into adult life," said Shaywitz. "The discovery that the neural 
systems for reading are intact in our most disadvantaged and most 
persistently poor readers has important educational implications and is of 
special relevance for teaching children to read."

JN:  The important educational implication is that we must employ a teaching 
method that stimulates the correct pathways from the earliest teaching of 
literacy skills at primary school, and likewise for remedial teaching at any 
age.  I assert that such a method is synthetic phonics.

----------

6.  COMPENSATION NOT ENOUGH

Further to the above, Robin Schwarz writes:

" John--  thank you back for YOUR response to mine-- it is true that I
neglected to cite research which Pugh had showing that intensive
intervention using a highly structured phonics-based reading approach
and intense instruction ( 3 hrs/day 5 days a week, if I remember
correctly) in fact, DOES cause the brain to function ( i.e. the same
areas light up in fMRI's) ALMOST exactly like a "non-impaired" brain
when reading--however in these efforts nearly all the impaired readers
failed to achieve anything like normal fluency.   Whether this  lack f
of fluency in decoding is because that is the hallmark of dyslexia,  as
is currently believed by some, and as I noted in my previous response,
or because other visual obstacles were not addressed ( I.e. tracking
and binocularity issues and especially scotopic sensitivity) is hard to
say.  If I had time and money, I would do a study to find out. "

JN:  Thanks for that Pugh result.

-----------

7.   MORE SIGHT WORDS?

Robin continues:

" While it is true that you can start out young readers with just a few
sight words in English, adult readers need way more sight words pretty
quickly to be able to engage with reading matter meaningfully.

I heartily agree that the phonological awareness can be way more
helpful in getting slow readers going than teaching rules.  We do not
read using rules consciously-- most good readers do not really start
with rule-based reading anyway-- I have seen readers literally
hamstrung by having too many rules thrown at them. "

JN:  This suggest to me that it is advisable to start with words having 
simple singular mappings between phoneme and grapheme, and only gradually 
introduce additional rules (such as the "magic e") and common irregular 
words.  With practice, the rules and the immediate recognition of common 
words becomes subconscious.  Sight words come naturally.  The necessary 
pathways in the brain have been developed.

-----------

Cheers from Chiswick,

John

John Nissen
Cloudworld Ltd - http://www.cloudworld.co.uk
maker of the assistive reader, WordAloud.
Tel: +44 208 742 3170  Fax: +44 208 742 0202
Email: info at cloudworld.co.uk




----- Original Message ----- 
From: <robinschwarz1 at aol.com>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <nifl-ld at literacy.nifl.gov>
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 3:33 PM
Subject: [NIFL-LD:4964] Re: LD and intensive phonics



> John--  thank you back for YOUR response to mine-- it is true that I 

> neglected to cite research which Pugh had showing that intensive 

> intervention using a highly structured phonics-based reading approach and 

> intense instruction ( 3 hrs/day 5 days a week, if I remember correctly) in 

> fact, DOES cause the brain to function ( i.e. the same areas light up in 

> fMRI's) ALMOST exactly like a "non-impaired" brain when reading--however 

> in these efforts nearly all the impaired readers failed to achieve 

> anything like normal fluency.   Whether this  lack f of fluency in 

> decoding is because that is the hallmark of dyslexia,  as is currently 

> believed by some, and as I noted in my previous response,  or because 

> other visual obstacles were not addressed ( I.e. tracking and binocularity 

> issues and especially scotopic sensitivity) is hard to say.  If I had time 

> and money, I would do a study to find out.

>

> While it is true that you can start out young readers with just a few 

> sight words in English, adult readers need way more sight words pretty 

> quickly to be able to engage with reading matter meaningfully.

>

> I heartily agree that the phonological awareness can be way more helpful 

> in getting slow readers going than teaching rules.  We do not read using 

> rules consciously-- most good readers do not really start with rule-based 

> reading anyway-- I have seen readers literally hamstrung by having too 

> many rules thrown at them.

>

> More later-- must run-- Robin Schwarz

>

> -----Original Message-----

> From: John Nissen <jn at cloudworld.co.uk>

> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-ld at literacy.nifl.gov>

> Sent: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 18:56:51 -0400 (EDT)

> Subject: [NIFL-LD:4952] Re: LD and intensive phonics

>

> Hello Robin,

>

> Thank you for an excellent contribution to the discussion.  You raise a

> number of issues.

>

> 1.  I agree with Tom that there are only around four hundred common

> graphemes.  I have got to a total around the 480 mark , though I am

> continuously adding to the list, with obscure spellings.  I have an Excel 

> spreadsheet, if anybody is interested.

>

> 2.  It is interesting that the dyslexia 'rate' is about half in Italy

> compared to UK, and I agree with you that this can be put down to the

> language - the complexity of spelling/pronunciation rules in English 

> versus Italian.

>

> 3.  However on the brain issue, I don't think there has been a study 

> showing

> the effect of teaching on the brain patterns.  Can we be sure that the

> 'dyslexic' has lost some brain function - an anomaly as you call it?

> Perhaps, with a common approach to teaching, common brain patterns will

> emerge.  If so, that would support my thesis that poor reading is the 

> result of inadequate teaching.  I'd like to see fMRI research on this.

>

> Note that in the Clackmannanshire study of around 300 children, taught by

> synthetic phonics, there were no non-readers!  So do we deduce there were 

> no

> dyslexics?  No dyslexia?   What was going on?  I'd love to see fMRI on 

> them.

>

> 4.  You need to have very few sight words, when you start teaching a child

> to read.  'I', 'the' and 'of' can get you a long way.  See my web page:

> http://www.cloudworld.co.uk/teaching-synthetic-phonics.htm

>

> 5.  The phonological awareness seems to be the biggest hurdle to get over

> for many children, not the complexity of the language: number of

> spelling/pronunciation rules, synonyms, multiple meanings, size of

> vocabulary, morphology, etc.  These complexities can be introduced

> gradually, after the initial hurdles have been overcome, and the children

> are reading simple stories, contrived to avoid those complexities (see my 

> story example at the end of the page).

>

> Cheers from Chiswick,

>

> John Nissen

> Cloudworld Ltd - http://www.cloudworld.co.uk

> maker of the assistive reader, WordAloud.

> Tel: +44 208 742 3170  Fax: +44 208 742 0202

> Email: info at cloudworld.co.uk

>

>

>

> ----- Original Message -----

> From: <robinschwarz1 at aol.com>

> To: "Multiple recipients of list" <nifl-ld at literacy.nifl.gov>

> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 9:48 PM

> Subject: [NIFL-LD:4943] Re: LD and intensive phonics

>

>

>

>

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Robinschwarz1

> To: nifl-ld at nifl.gov

> Sent: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:28:58 -0400

> Subject: Re: [NIFL-LD:4927] Re: LD and intensive phonics

>

> Sorry to be chiming in on this somewhat late-- I was traveling.

> Aaron's reference to Ken Pugh's work is great-- the point of

> Pugh's research, to my mind, is that the process of reading is the same

> in any language and occurs in the same part of the brain. When it can

> be observed that it does not, we can predict that that person will have

> more difficulty with "standard" teaching than the person whose brain

> does it in the more common, if you will, way.

>

> John has a point about "synthetic phonics"--the process of making

> English more predictable to decode. It has been observed by numerous

> researchers in the last decade that relatively few persons show up with

> reading problems (called dyslexia when reading is a very

> difficult skill to acquire) in languages which are more "transparent"

> or regular in their orthography--e.g. Italian, Hungarian, Finnish,

> Korean-. The effect of learning in those language is the same as with

> the synthetic phonics John is discussing-- the sound-symbol system is

> completely regular and easy to predict. I observed that in Italy, for

> example, children are able to spell almost every word in Italian by

> second grade because Italian is so regular.

>

> Because of this phenomenon, it was believed for a time that there was

> no dyslexia in these languages. But studies such as the one Ken Pugh

> and others have done show that the anomaly that causes difficulty

> in becoming a fluent reader is present in persons in all cultures and

> languages. It is only that their compensatory skills--provided either

> by the language they are learning in, or in the case of English, by

> extremely skilled teaching and hard work--have allowed them to overcome

> the anomaly. Recent attempts to find out if in fact dyslexia-- or

> that brain anomaly--could be detected have shown that readers in these

> transparent languages who have the anomaly still read more slowly

> relative to their non-impaired peers--though on an absolute scale

> comparing ALL readers, their slower reading is hard to detect.

>

> Many features of English contribute to its being such a difficult

> language for those persons with dyslexia--i.e. the well-documented

> brain anomaly causing the processing of the sound symbol association to

> occur in other places in the brain.


[snip]