Chapter I
Introduction
An eleventh grade student whom we will called student X has learning problems. Which makes it hard for her to comprehend any information or even read? When asked to read in class out loud, it became very embarrassing moment for the student. The student has dyslexia. According to Elbro and Jerren (2005) a significant proportion of student’s reading problems can be explained by poor word decoding. The authors further reported that such serve problems with decoding and receiving can be referred to as Dyslexia.
Learning disabilities are disorders of higher cognitive functions, present from birth or early childhood, neurologically based, and impact on the ability to learn or process information in one or more specific areas rather than a global intellectual impairment. In 1963, the term learning disability was formally introduced. At that time this term referred to disorders in development of language, speech, reading, and associated communication skills needed for social interaction. Of the many learning disabilities dyslexia is one of the top disabilities. It is proven that 80% of children in the United States have dyslexia. Due to differences of opinion in how dyslexia is assessed and determined, dyslexia may even be more prevalent (Shaywitz 2003). Using the 2003 definition, the International Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia as: A specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge. (Lyon et al. 2007) Three areas of the brain are required to effectively read: the anterior region, temporoparietal region, and the occipitotemporal region (Pugh et al. 2000). A small number people with dyslexia may have difficulties with the spatial skills needed for letter recognition, sequencing, or with comprehension of written language due to inadequate sight vocabulary or recall of earlier text. These skills are localized in the occipitotemporal area. The gap in reading skills increases as the no impaired reader becomes more in-depth with words and comprehending. Simply because of these difficulties they may face in their reading they tend to avoid tasks that require them to read or even comprehend when reading. Dyslexia deals with other parts of learning. For example Dyscalculia is the mathematics disability of dyslexia. People with this disorder have trouble understanding and comprehending math problems. These characteristics are representative of relatively deficient left hemisphere systems. Strange and Rourke (1985) have found that majority of children who experience difficulties in arithmetic calculation have deficiencies in one or more linguistic abilities. In addition to the mathematical disorders due to visual-perceptual, linguistic, or mixed deficits, some posit a fourth subgroup differentiated by specific deficits in nonverbal symbolic representation and quantitative thinking (Geary 1993; Johnson & Myklebust 1967). Even though you may have these disabilities dyslexia stills remains number in the learning disabilities in children today. It is even known internationally among students worldwide. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning difficulties found among Hong Kong students. According to the Jockey Club in Hong Kong (2006), dyslexia accounts for over 80% of specific learning difficulties cases. The general symptoms of dyslexia include difficulties regarding motor or perceptual skills, language skills, early literacy or pre-reading skills, reading skills and writing skills (Rief & Stern, 2010). Davis and Braun (2010) pointed out that it is difficult to define the symptoms of dyslexia since those with dyslexia do not have exactly the same set of symptoms. Although there are different points of view concerning symptoms of dyslexia they all have one thing in common and that is a spelling problem. The International Dyslexia Association (2008) outlined the drawbacks and difficulties with spelling of learners with dyslexia: (a) individuals with dyslexia have conspicuous problems with spelling and writing, in spite of being capable in other areas and having a normal amount of classroom instruction and (b) though may individuals with dyslexia learn to read fairly well, difficulties with spelling and handwriting tend to persist throughout life, requiring instruction, accommodations, task modifications, and understanding from those who teach or work with the individual.
Dyslexia Symptoms
Preschool / Kindergarten through grade 4 / Grades 5 through 8 / High School
- Talk later than most children Has difficulty reading single words that are not surrounded by other words Read at lower grade level Read very slowly in many inaccuracies
- Has difficulties pronouncing words example mawn lower instead of lawn mower Be slow to learn the connection between letters and sounds Reverse letter sequence such as “soiled” for “solid”, “left” for “felt” Work intensely on reading and writing tasks
- Be slow to add new vocabulary Confuse small words such as “at” and “to” Avoid writing Have poor memory skills and complete assigned work more slowly than expected
- Has trouble learning the alphabet Make consistent reading and spelling errors Have slow or poor recall of facts Have trouble preparing summaries and outlines for classes
- Has difficulty reciting common nursery rhymes Letter reversals such as “d” for “b” Have trouble with word problems in math Avoid tests that require reading and writing, and procrastinate on reading and writing tasks
- Be slow to develop fine motor skills Word reversals such as “tip” for “pit” Avoid reading aloud Have an inadequate vocabulary and be unable to store much information from reading
Chapter 2
The articles chosen for this research were very helpful and profound. The articles explained how dyslexia works and how it functions differently in all students. The first article used was named Learning Disabilities by Max Wiznitzer and Debora L. Scheffel. This article stated the different learning disabilities involving students. They are present from birth or early childhood, neurologically based, and impact on the ability to learn or process information. Later on in the article it stated how Dyslexia was 80% of the disabilities that children had today. At the end of the article it stated how you can find out if your child has Dyslexia. The physician is the first professional approached by the family with concerns regarding developmental functioning. The purpose of this visit should include problems that the physician may have seen in your child. After he or she should refer you academic testing or any methods of teaching to help your child. Neurologic Examination of the School-age and Adolescent Child was an article that pertained to helping to better understand how Dyslexia comes about. The neurologic examination is a very versatile diagnostic instrument when determining Dyslexia. When using it one should detect localizing and lateralizing signs of nervous system abnormalities, and determine reliably the maturational level of cognitive, emotional, and motor capacities, as well as physical growth and development. Standardized test are usually helpful to analyze age appropriate specific hearing and visual loss problems found on the neurologic evaluation; to evaluate nerve and muscle functions further; or to quantitatively characterize developmental language disorders or dyslexia. Results were found an article called Quality of phonological representations, verbal learning, and phoneme awareness in dyslexic and normal readers, the article stated that results pre-test measures are displayed in two different groups. The two groups differed significantly on the measure of non-word decoding even though they matched closely on silent word decoding. In high school it gets even harder for students who have Dyslexia. Most of them become shy and even withdrawn from others while trying to finish their career in high school; sometimes even end up being put in special education. The article named Visual skills of poor readers in high school shows how some students in California were suffering in high school from being Dyslexic. Visual skills and visual acuity were measured in 461 students (average age 15.4 years) in 4 California high schools within the same school district. Participating students had been identified by their schools as poor readers. Standard optometric tests and published criteria for “adequate” or “weak” visual skills were used. There were a few graphs used in this article. By showing these graphs it proves exactly what the article is talking about.
Table 1 Number of students referred as poor readers in
Each of 4 high schools in 1 California school district
School Number assessed Complete data Percent*
HS-1 132 124 93.9
HS-2 230 167 72.6
HS-3 175 133 76.0
HS-4 39 37 94.8
Total 576 461 81.7
* Percentage with data sufficiently complete to analyze.
The journal of child psychology and psychiatry wrote an article named Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades? It explained how research proved that dyslexia is a number one learning disability in children today. Such difficulties have been estimated to occur in approximately 10% to 15% of school age children (Benton&Pearl, 1978; Harris&Sipay, 1990; Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, & Makuch, 1992) and tend to be accompanied by specific deficits in cognitive abilities related to reading and other literacy skills. This symptom pattern is often called dyslexia, or, alternatively, specific reading disability, and the terms are often used interchangeably. We will adopt this convention to refer to children whose reading difficulties occur at the level of basic reading sub skills and are not caused by the exclusionary factors just mentioned (Lyon, 1995; Lyon, Fletcher, & Barnes, 2002; Shaywitz, 1996). While reading this article you will learn that there are components to learning how to read. Normal reading ability assumes adequate language comprehension and fluent word identification. Written words are encoded (symbolized) representations of spoken words, and spoken words are encoded representations of environmental experiences and entities. Thus, the ability to learn to read depends on the acquisition of a variety of different types of knowledge and skills, which, themselves, depend on normal development of reading-related linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive abilities. Figure 1 proves how the cognitive process of the brain works to develop your reading skills.
Permanent Memory:
World Knowledge and Domain Specific Knowledge
Linguistic Coding Processes and Knowledge:
♦ Phonological- theory of sound changes in a language or in two or more related languages
♦ Semantic- of or relating to meaning in language
♦ Morphological- a study and description of word formation (as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language
♦ Syntactic- linguistics
♦ Pragmatic- dealing with the problems that exist in a specific situation in a reasonable and logical way instead of depending on ideas and theories
This possibility is given added credibility by results from a second line of research, that is, regression studies evaluating skills and abilities underlying reading ability (Catts, Hogan, & Fey, 2003; Curtis, 1980; Foorman, Francis, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1997; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Vellutino, Scanlon, Small, & Tanzman, 1991; Vellutino et al., 1994). These studies have shown that there is a developmental asymmetry in the acquisition of skill in comprehending written text such that facility in word identification carries much greater weight as a determinant of reading comprehension in children at the early stages of reading development than in children at later stages, whereas language comprehension processes carry much greater weight as determinants of reading comprehension in children at later stages of reading development than in children at early stages of reading development. After further reading this article it goes on to tell the causes of cognitive deficit theories of dyslexia. Dyslexia has most often been attributed to deficiencies in visual, linguistic, and low-level sensory functions, and we exemplify such theories below. However, dyslexia has also been attributed to deficiencies in general learning abilities that are involved in all learning enterprises and not just learning to read. For example, specific reading disability has been variously attributed to deficiencies in selective attention (Douglas, 1972), associative learning (Brewer, 1967; Gascon & Goodglass, 1970), cross-modal transfer (Birch, 1962), serial-order processing (Bakker, 1972), and both pattern analysis and rule learning (Morrison & Manis, 1982). To better understand the study this is what the article stated to what happened in the study. In studies conducted comparing poor and normal readers across a broad age range (most often grades 2 through 8), few significant differences between these groups were found on measures of visual processing ability when the influence of verbal coding was controlled. For example, in experimental studies evaluating such processes (Vellutino, 1979, 1987; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1982), it was found that memory for visually presented letters and words that were visually similar (such as b, d, was, and saw) was as good in poor readers as it was in normal readers when the task required a written response rather than a naming response, which did differentiate these two groups. Language and language based deficit is a major part of learning when dealing with Dyslexia. Such findings suggest that early reading difficulties in children from this population may not be caused primarily by vocabulary and syntactic deficits and may, more often, be a consequence of prolonged reading problems. These deficits may also be co-morbid, reflecting the co-occurrence of oral language and reading difficulties (e.g., Catts et al., 2003). However, existing data do not preclude the possibility that vocabulary and syntactic deficits could contribute to difficulties in learning to read in some children. They would inevitably be a significant cause of reading comprehension problems, even in children who have adequate facility in word identification (Snowling, 2000b). The article explained how a person can end up with Dyslexia. The first prospective study of children at family risk of dyslexia was reported by Scarborough (1990), who followed the progress of 32 two-year-olds from families with a history of reading disability and compared them with children from control families having similar socioeconomic backgrounds. At 8 years, 65% of the high-risk sample (20 children) was classified as reading-disabled. At 5 years of age, the children who later became dyslexic had poor letter knowledge, poorly developed phonological awareness, and expressive naming difficulties. At 6 years, the high-risk impaired group continued to have difficulty on tasks evaluating vocabulary development and language processing skills, and they also performed poorly on tests evaluating explicit phonological awareness. On all of these tests, the unimpaired group performed within the normal range. Nonetheless, they knew fewer letters than controls at age 3 years 9 months (although more than the reading impaired children), and at 6 years, their reading, spelling and reading comprehension skills were less advanced than those of the normal reading controls. Importantly, on two measures evaluating phonological reading and spelling strategies, one involving no word decoding and the other involving the phonetic accuracy of early spelling, the high-risk unimpaired group performed as poorly as the high-risk impaired group and much less well than expected for their age. Article called Functional disruption in the organization of the brain for reading in dyslexia tells you how the brain functions with dyslexia and how it comprehends. Learning to read requires an awareness that spoken words can be decomposed into the phonologic constituents that the alphabetic characters represent. Such phonologic awareness is characteristically lacking in dyslexic readers who, therefore, have difficulty mapping the alphabetic characters onto the spoken word.
The figure explains how a non-impaired reader compares to a reader who has dyslexia. As you can see the people with dyslexia have higher numbers than the ones that are non-impaired. In this study we found significant differences in brain activation patterns between DYS and NI readers, differences that emerge during tasks that make progressive demands on phonologic analysis. These findings relate the cognitive/behavioral deficit characterizing DYS readers to anomalous activation patterns in both posterior and anterior brain regions (Fig. 3).Thus, within a large posterior cortical system including Wernicke’s area, the angular gyrus, the extrastriate and striate cortex, DYS readers fail to systematically increase activation as the difficulty of mapping print onto phonologic structures increases. In contrast, in anterior regions including the IFG and BA 46/47/11, dyslexic readers show a pattern of over activation in response to even the simplest phonologic task (SLR; Fig. 1). For NI readers, these data provide functional evidence of a widely distributed computational system for reading characterized by specialization and reciprocity: within the system, task-specific responses vary from region to region. For example, in the IFG only the complex phonologic task (NWR) produced a significant increase in activation relative to the orthographic (C) task, suggesting that this region is engaged in letter to sound transcoding; in Wernicke’s area both simple (SLR) and more complex (NWR) phonologic tasks produced significant increases in activation relative to the orthographic task, implying that this region processes information in a more abstract phonological form (Figure 1)
The main purpose of this article is to focus on context-free single word recognition skills. When people with Dyslexia read have problems in naming or recognizing single words causing them to stumble over their words.
Chapter 3
Thus can be a problem when they begin to read sentences or even paragraphs. Dyslexic people will always have a problem with learning how to read but it is treatable for them to learn how to read. Even though it takes a lot of work on the parents behave if they would their children to be helped and have the same opportunities has any other child that does not have a disability. There is so much technology dealing with learning disability in this day and time. In order for a child to be first treated the child needs to be tested and diagnosed by a professional doctor or psychiatrist dealing with a special in dyslexia. After finding all this information out the parent needs to take the test results and letters from the doctors to the child school. The school counselor then needs to have a meeting with the parents and teachers to better understand what is best for the child to help them with their disability. Every child is different and should not be treated the same. Even though dyslexia has a whole means needing help with decoding words and comprehending does not mean you use the same treatment. The family should know how to request a multidisciplinary evaluation and how to develop an individualized educational plan (IEP), including participation on the IEP team. Parents also need to understand that the public school system is required to help any child with a disability so the help is free only if they take it. While organized and structured treatment programmes have been proposed by many researches, it is believed that extra learning session offered only to students with dyslexia are essential so that teachers can more closely follow the students learning progress. Most people hear of dyslexia they think that people are either special education or mentally retarded. But that is not the case they are normal people just like everybody else, just in need of a little more attention than others. Dyslexia is so missed understood by many people. There are schools specifically for people with dyslexia where they can feel comfortable with each other and receive that one on one attention.
There are multiple effects on high school students with dyslexia. Reason being is students find out too late that they have dyslexia and sometimes it is too late to catch it. High school students are already almost mentally develop so therefore it makes harder to try to deprogram their brain and teach them new ways of learning. This makes it harder for the student and the teacher in classroom. In high school the student is deciding what they want to be in life but unfortunately most students cannot because they end up being in special education reason being in the earlier years no bothered to catch that they had dyslexia. So most graduate high school and end not even being able to go to college reason being, they tend to graduate with certificates instead of with diplomas. Causing them in life to feel as if they are stupid and cannot accomplish anything in life. Most end up on the streets and others just end up on welfare doing nothing with their life. That is why it so important that we being to catch dyslexia in the earlier stages of childhood in order to be able to help the children of our future we need to start testing them so we can treat them.
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