ANOTHER HURDLE FOR SOME DYSLEXICS: 'WHOLE LANGUAGE'

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Bennett and Sally Shaywitz, both professors at Yale's School of Medicine, study dyslexia very directly, by putting people inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and watching what parts of their brain light up when they read.

In an article published in the journal Biological Psychiatry this month, and summarized in Tuesday's New York Times science section, they and their co-authors say their brain pictures show there are two kinds of dyslexia.

In fluent readers, three areas of the brain work in parallel to turn printed words into meaningful text, processing what words look like, how they sound and what they mean (no anatomical details from me).

For one kind of dyslexic reader, the links within the brain to the "how they sound" part are poorly developed. These people have a hard time sounding out less familiar written words, although they know the words when they hear them.

Often, if they're otherwise smart, they may learn to use other parts of their brains to compensate. That's less efficient, and they remain slow readers, but they have average to superior comprehension of what they read. The Shaywitzes describe this kind of dyslexia as predominantly genetic.

The second kind of dyslexic reader appears to use the same areas of the brain as fluent readers do, but in addition a part of their brain in an area usually associated with memory lights up. (In fluent readers, it is inactive.) Typically, these dyslexic readers have problems with both speed and comprehension.

The researchers say this kind of dyslexia is "more environmentally influenced."

That is, it results from being taught reading by a method that stresses memorizing whole words instead of learning to sound them out. I'm thinking "look-say" (which was in fashion when I started school, but it didn't harm me because I already knew how to read) or the comprehension tricks taught to children in the "whole language" method in lieu of direct instruction in phonology.

One expert in dyslexia, Gordon Sherman, told the Times that once the brain has settled on a strategy for doing a certain task, such as reading, it tends to keep relying on that strategy, even if it isn't effective. Memorizing words is fine up to a point, Sherman said, but "then it fails quite miserably; there's too much to memorize."

Third grade is typically the time when children begin the shift toward "reading to learn," and so encounter in their reading words and ideas they have never had an opportunity to memorize. It is often the grade in which dyslexia is first diagnosed, too. Probably that isn't a coincidence.

Dyslexia is very common, Sally Shaywitz says, affecting as much as 20 percent of the population. A Yale news release about her new book Overcoming Dyslexia (which I haven't read), says it "tells what specific clues to look for at pre-school, kindergarten and first, second and third grades, as well as in young adults and adults" and describes what can be done to improve reading skills.

There were 70 subjects in the study, not enough to draw any conclusions about how relatively common the two types of dyslexia are. What's important is knowing what can be done to help them, something Shaywitz is quite optimistic about. Dyslexia can be treated, she says, "and I want that to be the take-away message from the book."

Well and good. But surely it is also worth noting that if the research pans out, we must face an unpleasant reality. Cock-eyed theories of how children learn to read, unsupported by scientific evidence but adopted as gospel by schools of education, were inculcated in generations of teachers who then proceeded, with all the caring and dedication at their command, to condemn many of their students to a lifelong disability.

The idea that reading comes as naturally to children as speaking, so that it is not necessary to teach them the specific skills involved, is as preposterous as the idea that riding a bike or flying a plane is as natural as walking. In both cases an existing function is adapted to a use never contemplated by evolution, and most people can master the adaptation with proper training. But without training a lot of them will crash.

Many dyslexics go on to successful careers, despite their difficulties. Maybe there is something to be said for learning to overcome a handicap, but surely not enough to justify imposing an unnecessary one.