There is a brave man in Durham. He is called Professor Elliot and he has suggested the term dyslexia is a waste of time:
There is always a howl of protest when someone says this, from dyslexics and dyslexia specialists!
I think there is actually an important question lying in what he is saying, which is “what does the word dyslexia really mean?”
What is undeniable is that the answer varies, depending on who you talk to. That is bad news for any word! The whole point of our vocabulary is to give shortcuts for lengthy definitions.
Personally I believe dyslexia is a very useful term if it refers to any situation where someone is reading and writing less well than one would expect for their intelligence and education. It is then an umbrella term for all sorts of patterns that can cause this situation.
Some people now refer to it as a “thing”, like a medical condition, that can be diagnosed. I have been teaching children to read for 12 years and have never come across this “thing” dyslexia. We just see bright children with lots of potential who, for a variety of neurological reasons, are not reading and spelling well.
It is the 8 Causes of Reading Difficulty that interest us. Once we know what the problem is, fixing it gets a lot easier. You will not find anything listed there as dyslexia, but the patterns we describe for each cause will resonate with some of the “signs of dyslexia” that you will find on long lists elsewhere on the Internet.
The danger of thinking of dyslexia as a medical condition is that people become defeatist and lose hope of reading and writing normally. That is a tragedy every time. In our experience, almost everyone can learn to read and write with the right help and some Guided Phonetic Reading.
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David Morgan is CEO of Oxford Learning Solutions and founder of the Easyread System, an innovative online program for struggling readers and spellers.
Well, it’s true that it can become an excuse… the label dyslexia… But it also is a nice alternative to stupid… So I would rather call my daughter dyslexic, also because she is. I recently helped my twins with a spelling test. My son spelled everything right…
accessible, incomprehensible, indistinguishable… but did not know the meaning of any of the words, My daughter (dyslexic?) new meaning of all words but spelled everything completely wrong.
I also don’t believe that phonics are much of a help in English as exception is the rule.
PS:
I am not middle class and live in a council flat
Hi Fenna,
I totally agree with you. It is a very useful term. The original meaning was “having unexpected difficulties with literacy for a child’s education and intelligence”. So the core of the meaning was really that something odd and unexplained was going on: the child’s reading level did not reflect their general intelligence. That is a great help to the child in that tough situation.
The problem is that the label has taken on a life of its own and the meaning has become distorted and changed by many of the groups trying to use it. Some people now refer to Dyslexia as the cause of reading difficulty, not the label for it. I believe that is wrong. Worse still, some “experts” will say one child has dyslexia (whatever it is they are calling that) while another child with equal intelligence and equal reading difficulty is not, through entirely subjective criteria.
All of this diverts people from the hunt for why someone is dyslexic (by the original definition above). We find the causes of dyslexia vary hugely (as you have seen) and can usually be fixed, at least to a reasonable degree, once you understand what is going on for that child.
I hope this makes sense! It can all seem a bit of a swamp.
Best wishes David