Dyslexia facts, myths and strategies

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I’ve just listened to a great Ontario IDA Reading Road Trip podcast, in which the IDA’s Kate Winn interviews Dr Jack Fletcher about dyslexia facts, myths and strategies. Click here to listen to the whole thing yourself, and/or read the transcript, which includes references. For the time-poor and my own learning, here’s what I thought were key takeaways.

Defining and diagnosing dyslexia

Dyslexia is a word-level reading and spelling problem which results from a combination of biological and environmental factors. It’s a persistent inability to respond to the kind of explicit, intensive, instruction that works for most people.

Instructional response is the most important criterion for diagnosing anyone with a Specific Learning Disorder, especially dyslexia. Diagnosis should be based on multiple criteria, including progress monitoring measures from intervention, and norm-referenced achievement testing. Specialist dyslexia assessment tools aren’t helpful or necessary. Cognitive tests are only useful in identifying kids who are at risk in the first two years of schooling. After grade two, assessment should be focussed on academic measures of reading, spelling, and writing.

It’s not valid to diagnose dyslexia based on a discrepancy between cognitive skills and academic performance. Kids with reading problems with high and low IQs have the same difficulties with phonological awareness, rapid naming and so on. IQ tests have racial and social bias, so there are social justice issues associated with their use. A Pattern of Strengths And Weaknesses model is also a discrepancy model, is typically inaccurate and grossly under-identifies kids with learning disabilities. We also need to be aware of English Language Learners when identifying at-risk kids, so they’re not misidentified.

Related/co-occurring difficulties

Other kinds of learning disorders and difficulties often co-occur with dyslexia, such as problems with writing or mathematics. Kids with dyslexia often also have difficulties with attention and/or language needing separate intervention. Stimulant medication can help a child pay attention but it won’t teach them how to read. Learning to read words doesn’t guarantee you’ll know what they mean.

About 25% of kids with dyslexia have clinical levels of anxiety. Anxiety predicts a poorer response to intervention, so one US expert, Sharon Vaughn, has introduced five minutes of mindfulness meditation at the start of intervention sessions, to reduce anxiety.

Psychiatrist Shepherd Kellam studied an approach which prevented behaviour problems, but found this didn’t help kids improve their reading. So he introduced a reading intervention, and found that when they became better readers, the girls were less depressed and the boys were less disruptive. He also found that kids all knew who was struggling with reading, and that this was a source of anxiety.

Can dyslexia be prevented?

Many severe reading problems can be prevented if kids get the right kind of explicit instruction and reading experience in their first three years of schooling. About 40% of kids find it hard to learn to read well without really explicit and fairly intense instruction and early reading experience. This makes them aware of the sounds in spoken words and helps them grasp the idea that these sounds are what letters represent (the alphabetic principle) and develops their brains as mediators of reading. Early access to print gives the brain the kind of visual experience it needs to become an automatic reader.

If kids don’t learn to read in the first three years of schooling, it’s very hard for them fully develop their neural system and get the reading experience and vocabulary they need to become skilled, automatic readers. They can be taught to decode, but end up with persistent reading problems. Intervention in first and second grade is twice as effective as intervention after the third grade. It’s hard to differentiate reading problems due to biology and those which are due to environment. Brain scans of third grade poor readers who were not taught well and third grade poor readers at biological risk of dyslexia look the same.

Poor instruction is unfortunately still quite common, though teachers are not to blame, they always have good intentions. They just may not have the training and the knowledge that they need to be effective instructors for kids who are at risk. Improving and maintaining high-quality instruction, including classroom management, needs to be an ongoing priority.

What kind of intervention?

Explicit, systematic instruction in the general early years classroom works for everyone, but works twice as well for the at-risk kids (see this research by Barbara Foorman et al). There should be systematic, explicit phonics: teaching the relationship between what words sound like and what they look like. There should also be cumulative practice of skills to automaticity, and work on comprehension. Reading and writing strengths and weaknesses should be monitored, and intervention adjusted accordingly.

If you are including all these elements and collecting data towards your benchmark, and making good progress, then you should just continue until students achieve the benchmark.

Research by the late Carol Connor suggests decoding/word level intervention is about four times more effective in a small group (3 or 4 children per teacher) than a large group, as long as the groups are well matched and managed. This makes sense, as in phonics lessons, teachers have to listen closely to each child, and notice and correct their errors. There’s no evidence that individual phonics instruction is better than this kind of well-matched small group work (click here for information about upcoming Spelfabet holiday groups). The best indicator of which kids should be grouped together is their reading fluency.

Meaning-based instruction, on the other hand, can be done equally well in small or large groups. For English Language Learners, quality of instruction seems to make more difference than language of instruction.

Myths about dyslexia

Dyslexia is not a gift. The myth that people with dyslexia have special talents might result from individual differences and the natural orientation of development towards strengths.

People with dyslexia don’t see letters backwards. As we learn to read, we see mirror images of words in both sides of the brain, which gradually lateralises to the left side of the brain. This happens more slowly in people with dyslexia.

Other myths include: that coloured lenses or overlays help with reading; that dyslexia is a reading comprehension problem; that it’s rare; that people grow out of it; that Brain Training programs not involving reading instruction work; and that improving home literacy will overcome dyslexia. See the blue box on the right of Fletcher and Vaughn’s interesting article titled “Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems for the full list of 18 myths Dr Fletcher refers to in the podcast.

Thanks a quintillion to Kate Winn and Ontario IDA for this interesting podcast series, I’ll be going through the back catalogue in coming weeks, and just noticed a new 4 March 2024 episode pop up, with Australia’s own Dr Jennifer Buckingham. One for tomorrow’s morning dog walk, methinks.

New word-building videos

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I’ve made three very short videos (each under 90 seconds) showing how lots of long words are built by adding prefixes and suffixes to base words. The tiles depicted are from the Spelfabet Moveable Alphabet and Affixes, many of which flip over, making it easy to demonstrate juncture changes e.g. how ‘y’ changes to ‘i’ in ‘funny-funnier’, and final consonants double in ‘run-running’ and ‘hop-hopping’.

The aim is to minimise wordy explanation, and maximise demonstration, so I’ll stop explaining them now, and let them speak for themselves. Hope you like them.

Overhaul of Initial Teacher Education

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I’ve been doing little happy dances about the announcement in the video below, and am celebrating with a two-week 20%-off-everything sale in the Spelfabet shop (use the coupon code HappyDance at the checkout):

An expert panel review has found that Australia’s universities aren’t preparing teachers to teach reading and writing well. Our Education Ministers say they must do better at this, and other areas like maths and classroom management, without delay. Teacher knowledge is the key to student success.

A lot of good work from many good people has achieved this, but there’s nothing so inspiring or persuasive as a good example. Schools in the Canberra-Goulburn diocese have retrained their teachers in the science of learning, and reduced NAPLAN reading underperformance from 42% to just 4%, with similar gains in writing and spelling. Read more about this here, and make sure your school leadership knows about their Catalyst program.

Researchers have known for a long time that this kind of success is possible, but it’s less well understood in schools and the wider community, and there are still barriers to its achievement needing dismantling. Education academics and others have already pushed back on the conclusions of the teacher education review, arguing that things like inequitable school funding and teacher workloads, wages, and status are the real problem.

I think it’s shocking that most government schools (which educate the most needy students) get less funding than they’re entitled to under the School Resource Standard, while private schools get more. This should be corrected, pronto, but it’s not an argument against improving teacher preparation. We need both funding fairness and excellent teacher preparation.

Teachers have to work harder when their classes include many kids who can’t read or write very well. Work must be differentiated. Too many kids who understandably hide their learning difficulties behind challenging behaviour must be prevented from distracting the whole class, and supervised in detention. This is not fair to either kids or teachers. It’s preventable.

Giving graduate teachers the skills to get most kids reading and writing well enough to participate and succeed in class should reduce teacher workloads. Success at important work tends to lead to job satisfaction, respect from others, and a sound argument for higher wages. None of the arguments I’ve heard against the ITE overhaul so far stack up.

I’m excited and happy-dancing for two other reasons:

Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference

The international Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference will be held in Australia (Port Douglas, ehem) later this month, and I’m going. Stay tuned for a blog post or three about it.

So many amazing people will contribute to the 22-page program, it’s hard to know which sessions to attend, or who to ask for a selfie, or what to focus on for the blog. If you’re coming too, please can we share notes?

Display of decodable books

After collecting decodable books and setting up ad hoc displays for years, we’ve finally set up a Proper Display of a range of decodables in our North Fitzroy office. Looking at things to buy online is just not the same as being able to pick them up and handle them yourself. We’re hoping our display will help local early years teachers successfully make the case, and obtain the funds, to replace their classroom’s predictable/repetitive texts with high-quality decodables.

My colleagues Elle Holloway and Georgina Ryan have been examining the books in detail, and writing summaries to help teachers evaluate the different options. Stay tuned for a blog post about how to book an appointment to browse the display, which currently looks like this:

What do kids’ names teach them about spelling?

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The first word a child often learns to read and write is their own name. What first impression of our writing system does this give little Charlie, Chloe and Charlotte?

Our current crop of 5-year-olds was born in 2018, so I googled most popular baby names 2018 and looked for names that wouldn’t surprise a child with complete faith in ‘sounds of letters’, alphabet song type phonics.

I found only one name: Max. Even that would surprise kids whose poster/song says letter ‘X’ represents /eks/ as in ‘x-ray’. Add Quinn if you know a doubled consonant is usually pronounced the same as a single one, and your poster/song doesn’t say letter ‘Q’ by itself represents /kw/.

However, most kids’ names have more than one syllable, and contain at least one unstressed vowel. Let’s assume kids aren’t phased by vowel reduction or doubled consonants. Now we can sound out Emma, Ella, Camilla, Madison, Elena, Addison, Bella, Stella, Anna, Allison, Benjamin, Cameron, Adam, Landon, Colton, Ezra, Hudson, Dominic, Jameson, Evan, Declan, and Weston. A total of 24 names out of 200.

Hmm. Let’s add names containing ‘long’ vowel sounds represented by one letter (‘a’ in apron, ‘e’ in even, ‘i’ in icy, ‘o’ in open, ‘u’ in unit). IMHO the best thing about letter names is that the vowel names are also relevant sounds (but kids who extrapolate this to consonant letters tend to write ‘spl’ for ‘spell’, ‘pn’ for ‘pen’ and ‘cr’ for ‘car’). A child able to manipulate vowel sounds in words can now sound out Ava, Zoe, Maya, Penelope, Lila, Nova, Hazel, Violet, Eva, Mason, Logan, Jacob, Leo, Caleb, Owen, David, Samuel, Eli, Nolan, Roman, Rowan, and Jason.

This brings us up to 46 of 200 names, or 50 if we count names with ‘long’ vowel sounds written with ‘split’/VCe/silent final e spellings: James, Zane, Miles, Grace, (though she has a funny /s/ spelling), and Luke (though his vowel sound is really /oo/, not /ue/ as in ‘tune’).

Three-quarters of this sample of kids’ names still contain unexplained spellings. I don’t understand why being able to spell one’s own name is considered such an important milestone for tinies. Spelling names can be very hard, though Vaughan, Traigh, Clodagh, Siobhan, Niamh and Leigh weren’t hot in 2018.

Kids can make more sense of unexpected spellings in their names (and other words) if they know:

  • There are more speech sounds than letters, so we write many with letter combinations.
  • Some spellings represent more than one sound.

Our Embedded Picture Mnemonic desk mats are one simple tool which can help teach these concepts. They have the alphabet on one side, and the other speech sounds on the flip side, for example:

They also show shared spellings, as at the start of Asher and Ava, Evelyn and Ethan, Isabella and Isaac, Olivia and Owen, the ‘u’ in Hunter and Samuel and the ‘oo’ in Brooklyn and Cooper:

Confusion over harder sound-spelling relationships in names can be assuaged by teaching kids that most sounds are spelt a few ways, for example:

  • The sound /ee/ is written ‘i’ in Sophia, Olivia, Aria, Amelia, Mia, Mila (depending on pronunciation), Aaliyah, Eliana, Arianna, Victoria, Emilia, Liliana, Lillian, Gabriella, Maria, Gianna, Naomi, Juliana, Vivian, Julia, Ezekiel, Damian, Xavier, Adrian, Gabriel, Sebastian, and Liam.
  • /ee/ is written ‘ey’ at the end of Riley, Aubrey, Kinsley, Hailey, Paisley, and Audrey.
  • /i/ is written ‘y’ in Dylan, and is unstressed in Adalyn, Evelyn, Madelyn, Brooklyn, and Jocelyn.
  • /ie/ is written ‘y’ in Ryan, Wyatt, Skyler, Bryson, and Kylie.
  • /k/ is written ‘ch’ in Chloe, Michael, Nicholas, Christian (from Greek).
  • /f/ is written ph in Sophie, Sophia, Joseph and Christopher (also from Greek).
  • /z/ is written ‘X’ in Xavier, Xander and Xena, though sadly the Warrior Princess’s name wasn’t trending in 2018 (again, Greek!).

During a recent conversation about where words come from, a tween with an unusually-spelt name told me she’d always wondered about the spelling of her name.

Please don’t leave the kids in your life wondering.

Help the government improve adult literacy!

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Screenshot from the Australian Reading Writing Hotline handbook for volunteer adult literacy tutors (emoji is added).

The elephant-in-the-room fact that millions of Australian adults have poor literacy skills is back in the news. Radio National’s AM program reports that the government is concerned millions of adults are missing out on jobs, or are ashamed to even apply for work, because they lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills.

We’ve known about this problem since the 1996 ABS Adult Literacy Survey, but nobody in the adult literacy sector seemed to know what to do about it. Most of their teachers were sold the same Balanced Literacy story (balancing effective and ineffective) at university as other teachers, so that’s not too surprising.

If you cringed through SBS’s Lost For Words, or have browsed the Reading Writing Hotline website, you already know the adult literacy sector hasn’t really kept up with reading/spelling research. The RWH website’s “Literacy Face To Face” handbook for volunteer adult literacy tutors contains an explanation of how we read which goes beyond the three-cueing nonsense still being taken seriously in far too many schools, saying, “The efficient reader uses four sets of clues…” I kid you not. Section 1, page 4. Read it and weep. The screenshot above is from page 7. I really, truly am quite lost for words.

The Minister for Skills and Training, Brendan O’Connor, has commissioned a study to give the government a clearer picture of where adults lack basic skills. I think it also needs to get a clear picture of what scientific research has discovered about how we actually learn to read and spell, and how well this research is understood and translated into practice in the adult literacy sector. Or not.

If the study assesses adults’ reading and spelling, but not phonological processing skills, it will be about as informative as studying an iceberg by examining the part sticking out of the water, while ignoring the part under the water, holding it up (or not). If you’d like to tell the people designing the research this, or anything else, click here and do it before April 24th.

The Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox, says basic skill shortages are a national crisis for employers. In their 2021 survey of over 300 employers, 99% said that they’d been disadvantaged in some way because of basic skill shortages among current or prospective staff.

The Chief Executive of the National Apprentices Employment network says an apprenticeship is not a training program in literacy, numeracy or digital skills, and good candidates are missing out because they lack foundational skills.

There’s no shortage of heavyweights who know we have a serious adult literacy problem. I wish we could be confident there were plenty of people in the adult literacy sector offering serious, evidence-informed solutions. The solutions will probably have to come from outside the sector, from people like the readers of this blog. Please, go for it!

Embedded Picture Mnemonic picture files

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Example bookmarks for Sounds-Write beginners, whipped in a word processor table in about 30 mins.

Since devising the Spelfabet Embedded Picture Mnemonics, illustrator Cat Macinnes and I have received many requests for products containing them: bookmarks, placemats, friezes, flip charts, cards and posters of different sizes, slideshows, you name it. They’ll even make an appearance on The US Reading League’s Reading Buddies TV show at some stage. The Science of Reading community is a creative one.

Sadly, we don’t have capacity to print, store and mail out lots of hard copy resources containing our mnemonics. If you know of an interested publisher, we’d love to hear from them! Even designing and producing all the downloadable resources people have suggested would be a full-time job for quite a while. We aren’t designers, and already have full-time jobs.

We’re therefore making high-resolution versions of the picture files (.png files, for both PC and Apple) available for people to download and use in creating resources for their own students/caseloads/children. This should make it easy to organise them into any phonics teaching sequence, and print customised materials for any group of beginning readers. Click here to download a zipped folder of the whole set.

Over time, we’ve created alternate versions of some mnemonics, thanks to feedback from purchasers, and in an effort to cater to a surprisingly large audience. Our original ‘e/egg’, ‘o/orange’ and ‘u/undies’ mnemonics were OK for Australian English, but ‘e/echo’, ‘o/octopus and ‘u/up’ were needed for speakers of US English. Recently we’ve discovered that some people aren’t keen on ‘y/yoga’, so we’ve added this nice y/yawn mnemonic to the set.

The zipped folder of picture files includes all the mnemonics we’ve produced to date (except the ‘th/path’ and ‘th/weather’ ones, which weren’t a hit), so when there’s a choice, please use the one that suits you best. In parts of rural Australia where doors aren’t often locked, k/kangaroo is probably a better choice than ‘k/key’. On a surf-mad coast ‘ur/surf’ might make more sense than ‘ur/burn’. In the US, ‘air/hair’ and ‘ear/gears’ aren’t needed, but ‘aw/claw’ is, and ‘wh/whale’ might be (in places where ‘witch’ and ‘which’ aren’t homophones).

When you introduce ‘long’ vowels, you might like to make little strips for student desks like this…

…or a strip like this might suit your students/teaching sequence better:

Hooray, everyone will be able to tailor the set to their accent/sequence/needs, including people who speak Englishes other than Australian, British and American. Cat already put time and talent into drawing all the mnemonics, so you might as well use whichever suit you best (yes, we prefer ‘u/undies’, and people keep asking us to bring it back, ha ha).

Artists should be paid properly for their work, so please respect Cat’s copyright and abide by the terms of use included in the pack. Pricing is based on the assumption that each teacher/therapist/parent who buys the files will use them as they see fit with their class/caseload/family members, and not share them with other professionals or use them for commercial purposes. It’s OK for parents to share printouts with little cousins or the kid next door, but if a school with five Early Years teachers wants to use them in a range of resources across five Early Years classrooms, the school should buy five copies.

The picture files are in .png format, which is the best format for storing high-resolution artwork. They are in a zipped folder which looks like this in the Downloads area of the Spelfabet shop:

Download it to your computer, and you’ll be able to unzip it and access the files, and save them somewhere easy to find and use. Don’t panic if you double-click on a file and it opens in your default picture program and looks a bit weird. The pictures should look as you expect when you drop them into documents. Please reduce picture file size first if they’re too big for your purposes, so the resources you make from them don’t take up lots of space on your computer or take ages to print out. Like adding salt when cooking, it’s easy to make files smaller and lower-resolution, but not reverse the process.

As reading researchers might have predicted, lots of people have told us they’ve been surprised how quickly children have learnt sound-letter relationships using the Spelfabet Embedded Picture Mnemonics. We hope that’s true of any young beginners you try them with, and that you find them quick and easy to turn into great, affordable resources that suit your accent, location and teaching sequence.

Click here to get the whole set.

“Can I halp you?” The Salary-Celery merger

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Image: Free Clip Art: Wikimedia

If you’re in south-eastern Australia or New Zealand, you’ve probably noticed kids pronouncing words with /e/ (as in ‘egg’) more like /a/ (as in ‘at’) before the sound /l/.

They say things like ‘Can I halp you?’, ‘I falt a bit sick’ and ‘I can do it mysalf’. They pronounce ‘salary’ and ‘celery’ as homophones, hence the name linguists have given this vowel shift: the Salary-Celery merger.

The ‘a’ before /l/ in ‘asphalt’ was being pronounced /e/ when I was scraping my knees on it at school, but ‘a’ pronounced /e/ mainly occurs before /n/, as in ‘any’, ‘many’, ‘secondary’ and ‘dromedary’.

Several other vowels have also morphed a bit before /l/, consider:

  • all, ball, call, fall, gall, hall, mall, also, almost, always etc (but not ‘shall’, ‘ally’, ‘alley’, ‘ballad’, ‘gallop’, ‘pallet’, ‘tally’ or ‘alas’).
  • walk, talk, chalk, stalk, and baulk (US balk) and caulk (US calk).
  • half/halve, calf/calve, behalf (but not ‘salve’ or ‘valve’).
  • salt, halt, malt, gestalt, alter, exalt, Walter (but not ‘shalt’).
  • fault, vault, cauldron, assault, cauliflower, hydraulic, somersault (but not ‘haul’ or ‘maul’).

The sound /l/ has a vowel-like quality and tends to ‘colour’ the preceding vowel. This is useful for teachers to know, so they can give any confused kids plenty of practice spelling affected words (there’s lots of opportunities to practice writing ‘short vowels’ in a range of phonetic contexts, including before /l/, in Spelfabet Workbook 1)

When kids insist that they hear an /a/ (as in ‘cat’) in ‘halp’, I ask them to say the word in their ‘spelling voice’ (as it’s written), with /e/ (as in ‘red’). Good spellers often say that they pronounce odd spellings a bit weirdly when writing them (Wed-nes-day, bus-i-ness), as a kind of mnemonic. Spelling pronunciations sometimes crop up in comedy too, for example the kniggits in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Prof Linnea Ehri (2nd from left) with Nicola Anglin, Alison Clarke, Maria Narouz and Adrianna Galioto of Spelfabet

US reading/spelling guru Professor Linnea Ehri was recently here in Melbourne courtesy of Learning Difficulties Australia (the selfie at right proves we met her), and talked about this strategy, which she calls the “Spelling Pronunciation Strategy”. She says that in Connectionist theory, to put a word’s spelling into long-term memory, the letters must be connected to ‘phoneme mates’ in the pronunciations of the word.

To use the Spelling Pronunciation Strategy (AKA “Spelling Voice” in the program Sounds-Write) you separate and say each syllable with stress, and pronounce all the letters. Prof Ehri’s examples were “ex cell ent ”, “lis ten”, “choc o late”, and “Feb ru ary”. She cited two studies (Drake & Ehri, 1984 and Ocal & Ehri, 2017) showing that assigning spelling pronunciations enhanced memory for spellings, in 4th graders and college students.

So in summary, it’s not just harmless to say words in a slightly funny way to halp, sorry, help yourself remember their spellings. It’s officially evidence-based.