This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
2.8 Identification – Later years 2
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
Definitions and identification of dyslexia
Causes; identification; numerous activities include simple methods of observation (not formal diagnosis)
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
Another thing you can see with students who have had a history of struggling
with reading, is as well as this capacity issue,
they may just have felt either because of the effort of decoding, or
potentially, because they are finding the content hard in terms of the vocabulary.
Children who struggle consistently with text,
start to develop a sense of, 'I am just not going to understand this'.
And so, over time, this develops into an astrategic approach,
we can say, towards text.
And you might see when you ask them to find something in a textbook,
they don't seem to have any idea of really where to start to find information or
how to mine that text effectively.
And this makes sense if we think about this child's experience.
They may have had many experiences of failure.
So it may be a fairly accurate belief that actually this is not going to make sense.
'I'm not even going to, I just don't know how to even approach the text.'
But what's happened here is that the child has lost out on developing
strategies that typically developing readers will use fairly
unconsciously when they start to develop, when they start experiencing, and
being exposed to more and more complex texts.
Where when you're presented with something challenging,
you are, at a fairly unconscious level, checking for your comprehension.
If you don't understanding something, you're likely to re-read it.
You might go back and try and work out the connection between two different things.
These things can develop fairly automatically
but in students who have had a history of struggle,
these things won't be developing, because in a way,
they don't have the confidence that they are going to be able to comprehend.
And so, in terms of helping these students,
it's really almost reprogramming them, and
helping them develop a self efficacy that actually they can.
That if we break things down into bite-size chunks,
they can comprehend and so it's helping them see, you can do this and
here are the strategies that you can use to do this.
So to recap so far, so we've said that when you've got an older
struggling reader, you may or may not see overt decoding issues.
There is likely to be some reading fluency issues, although sometimes not.
And also here, it's important to add that students may
either be reading with expression or they may sound more of a monotone.
And while we typically associate reading with expression with understanding,
don't always, I think, always check out this assumption.
Because some children kind of learn to read with expression, but
they're still actually struggling with the comprehension demands.
So, check this out.
And then finally, we've mentioned that there is going to be a group of children
where reading comprehension is a struggle.
This won't be all children.
Some children with dyslexia,
the problem does stay fairly confined to the decoding aspect.
And a strong oral language kind of buffers and
helps the bigger task of reading comprehension.
But you will have a group where, as we've said, either the sheer effort of
the decoding in fluency are detracting from the deeper comprehension.
Or as we've said, students have developed almost a defense system against texts,
and so haven't learned the strategies,
the skills readers use to navigate more complex texts.
Another, perhaps even more distinctive sign of reading issues in later years,
or literacy issues, shall we say, is persistent issues with spelling.
This is something many adults with dyslexia report.
'You know, readings easier now, I can even read books for pleasure
but spelling, you know, is a nightmare.'
And this makes sense again with reading, even if you struggle to know what
the word is, there's something there on the page to give you a starter
whereas with spelling, you're generating something from nothing.
It's quite a scary task when you think about it that way,
especially when we talked about with English, the fact that if you say,
trying to write, maybe you are trying to spell a word like 'through'.
You think of that sound 'oo', and we know that in English there's many
different says that sound can be spelled with our letter system.
And so, there are many irregularities that just have to be learned.
So, spelling can persist as an issue.
This also means spelling is clearly just a part of the literacy equation.
We spell in order to write larger stretches of text.
And so, again, we do see varied profiles of writing in
people with (a) history of dyslexia.
And the story's very parallel to that,
that we discussed with reading comprehension.
If there's a problem with the nuts and bolts of writing, so either the spelling,
as we've talked about, or it can be that the physical transcription,
the graphomotor skills can be effortful.
If you've got issues with these lower levels, then you're going to have
downstream effects, and it's going to leave less capacity for
the other parts of writing, which is the idea generation, making sure that you've
got coherence between sentences, between paragraphs, between pages.
I mean, writing, even for people who would consider themselves
as not having a problem with reading, is a hard task.
I am sure many of you will remember, or be in the midst of student activities
where you are having to write essays or reports, and it's hard -
much harder than speaking in may ways;
it is because it is such a complex process.
You have the lower level of spelling and transcription.
And here is a slide that shows these levels.
You then have a layer of, sentence level, that you have to consider.
So, you need to get that right,
grammatical, forms of the words you're using.
You need to, remember whether you've, when you introduce a character or
an individual, you need to work out how much you then need to re-reference them so
that your audience knows who you're talking about.
So you've got your kind of local level coherence that you
need to be thinking about.
But then also, if you're writing a story or persuasive essay,
there's actually a big overarching purpose here that you need to keep hold of
through all of these other processes that you're juggling.
So, it's an epic task for anyone, and certainly for
people who are struggling to read.
Writing ... can be even more tough.
I'm now showing you a slide with some useful pointers from
a researcher called Gary Troia, which really summarizes
some of the key aspects of writing that can be a struggle for
people who have a history of illiteracy problems.
So the first one here is shorter, incomplete text,
and poor organization is really a hallmark here,
struggling to keep different parts of the text coherent,
struggling with the introduction of ideas and
keeping things in a logical sequence, and the overall quality may be weaker too.
If writing is an effort, you're not going to have so
much energy to think about using some new difficult words that you've just learned.
Or you may not have the mental energy to be thinking about different forms of
sentence structures and that you're not always using the same combinations.
You're going to be going for efficiency and economy of effort here.
So often, for people that have had to struggle with literacy,
you'll seek short texts -
in a way, they're just trying to get this job done.
As we've mentioned, you'll also see difficulties with spelling, but
then punctuation can also be an issue.
And again, this is an issue of just juggling the various demands.
Punctuation can be something that falls out of the priority list.
Then we can also see difficulty (in) self-regulation the writing process.
So this is in terms of when we think about writing,
especially on paper, this is changing now that we use keyboards more.
But with paper, you think ahead, you form a whole idea and
then you put it down onto the page.
And so, this actually requires quite strong executive functioning to do this
forward planning so that you don't end up with a messy page.
And this is hard.
And so, for many people with dyslexia, you will see that messy page
where something's written, they realize you want to change it,
and so, this can be another feature you see.
You may see socio-cognitive challenges.
This sounds a bit abstract.
But what it's really meaning here is, again, one of the extra burdens of
writing is that you have to try and understand who your audience
might be even if they're not there in the room with you as you're writing.
So it's actually much harder than when you're expressing yourself orally,
your audience is there giving you very explicit cues.
Writing is a much more kind of lonely task, in a way.
You're imagining your audience.
And this is another thing to juggle, as well as your main content,
your spelling, your punctuation.
And so,
we're not saying here that children with dyslexia have general pragmatic issues,
but it's another aspect of writing that you need to be a skilled writer.
And sometimes with everything else,
it can be a skill that is left 'til the end or omitted.
And then, as you might imagine, what you're going to see here,
if writing is such a hard task, you'll see a lower self-efficacy,
and just lower motivation for people who have this struggle with writing.
And it's clear why lots of school requires writing and we find that this much
of a struggle, you know that your output isn't quite what you want.
It becomes a very demotivating cycle.
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