Whenever anyone uses the term I now have to ask for their definition. My own view (simplified) is that a dyslexic student suffers from a relatively rare neurologic disorder which interferes with reading processing - the prevalence is approximately 2 to 3 students per 600 or so. Others feel that all reading difficulties can be grouped under a classification called dyslexia - this could include 200 our so children out of 600. From this you can see the variance is extreme.
A special ed teacher unable to teach phonics?? Sounds like an auto mechanic who cannot drive.
Ken Campbell
Re: Dyslexia Prevalence
This just came up with my son. His vision therapy doctor told him he wasn’t dyslexic because he can read. I explained to my son that many people use this word differently, but in our family we are going to use the word to mean anyone who’s brain is wired differently resulting in difficulty learning to read. (in other words I am excluding children who haven’t been taught how to read or are disadvantaged in someway other than neurologically)
I would say that a child with a processing problem that has difficulty with fluency despite good attack skills (very much like mine at this point) could be referred to as dyslexic.
Its a nice simple word that many people are comfortable with. My son likes it.
Re: Dyslexia Prevalence
Ken, I don’t know if I want to use the term “dyslexia,” but I do believe the incidence of genuine reading/language arts LD is a little higher than your stats. I base this upon my experience during the past ten years at an elementary of almost 800 where we did hold pretty firmly to the criteria of the discrepancy AND the
Most remediated pretty nicely. Very few, if any, remediated so completely that they did not still show signs of their LD. I did teach the decoding to the students with phonological processing difficulties via explicit, multi-sensory techniques. Then I still found most were very slow in processing, so I often used your program to build fluency. By upper grades they were in much, much better shape, usually close to grade level in the 60-80 wpm range, depending upon how severe their difficulty was in the first place.
By the way, this is a school that does use research-based teaching methods from grade K.
Now if you are only referring to only the very most severe students who almost couldn’t learn w/o very intensive 1:1 therapy, I had very few. Some kids take longer to get going than others.
That’s a good one, Ken, and VERY true!
I believe that there should be a processing disorder to some extent to be termed dyslexia, not just poor phonics instruction. But I am not sure where the line should be drawn because my own child has very low phonological memory but good word attack skills. This results in terrible fluency. So your guess is as good as mine whether this would be called dyslexia.
How are you feeling these days?
Janis