Why Dyslexia is NOT a Reading Disability
(November, ’23)

My predecessor at the London Language and Literacy Unit (LLU+), based then at Southbank University, was Cynthia Klein (2000). I remember having a conversation with her about 25 years ago. She had recently met with Prof. Maggie Snowling and been given some advice. Prof. Snowling cautioned Cynthia to avoid talking about dyslexic strengths, since these were merely anecdotal and in promoting them, would discredit her own work. Cynthia failed to take that advice. I suspect, among other things, this is because she worked with adults and it is impossible to work with dyslexic adults without recognising the consistent patterns of our experiences. There has been much water under the bridge since then and it is now common knowledge that dyslexia presents patterns of strengths as well as difficulties. But this has made very little difference to the way children are treated by our education systems, even if it has, to some degree, for adults.

Of course there have been some landmark changes in awareness, not least of which is the recognition of ‘dyslexic thinking’ as a strength...

The dictionary definition being,: “ An approach to problem-solving, assessing information, and learning, often used by people with dyslexia, that involves pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking, and interpersonal communication.” Dictionary.com

It is fairly elementary to recognise that dyslexic thinking, problem solving, and creativity depend on the way we make meaning. And our dyslexic strategies appear to be true for almost all forms of neurodivergence. Meaning, for us, arises in the recognition of patterns. We seek out the big picture, because without it, all we have is a string of disconnected ‘facts’. There is no meaning in identifying them in isolation. We need to see how they interconnect and relate to each other. Our problem solving and creativity is launched from this context. We try to avoid getting bogged down in detail until we see the whole. We are essentially holistic learners, usually mediated through visual thinking. It is only after we can see the big picture, that details can be meaningfully identified or re-arranged within the patterns. This view is no longer particularly contentious, but few educators or policy makers appear to understand the implications.

Difficulty with learning to read has, historically, been a hallmark of being dyslexic. When academics in the USA failed to agree on definitions of dyslexia, many tried to simplify the issue by defining dyslexia as a ‘reading disability’, as if dyslexia and reading difficulties are synonymous (e.g. Vellutino et al, 2004). This merging of concepts fails, of course, to have a reasonable explanation for the strengths of dyslexia, but until the strengths were recognised, this was not an issue. However, the concept of dyslexia ‘as a reading disability’ has become entrenched in Western education systems, and in the so-called ‘science of reading’.

In the UK, the reading wars led to the development of the ‘simple view of reading’ championed by Sir Jim Rose (2006) who concluded that children needed systematic synthetic phonics and nothing but systematic synthetic phonics until the child had acquired all the rules of phonics required to decode English words. Interestingly, The Rose Review (2009) was based on a commissioned research paper undertaken by Chris Singleton which recognised the limitations of a diet of phonics. Rose refers to it in his review.

“However, as with the early intervention studies, even the most effective intervention programmes (based on systematic synthetic phonics) do not lead to significant reading gains for all participating children and depending on the reading skills measured, from 15 to 60% of older pupils with dyslexia may fail to respond.” (Rose, J., 2009, p69)

Curiously, rather than look for a different approach that they would respond to, the belief in phonics was so ideologically fixed, that the only solution offered for this impasse, was even more phonics.

So let us consider what alternative approaches might suit us better, and why phonics remains so difficult for many of us. We have already noted that a dyslexic approach to learning is to start by discovering the big picture. When reading, this involves identifying why we are reading, what the book, overall, is about. Previewing is a good holistic strategy. We want to raise our prior knowledge - how does this book fit with what we already know, and how does it differ? What do I want to find out? These are strategies to which we can relate, that make sense to us. If we wish to succeed, we always start from the top down, not from the bottom up.

Of course, decoding single letters and combinations of letters without that big picture, is evidently starting from the bottom up- starting with the detail before we can make any sense of anything. Starting with the detail and decoding requires something else- a good working memory. Most neurodivergent people, by definition, have very limited working memory. Consequently, even if we manage to decode (which places a heavy burden on working memory), we often struggle to bring meaning to what we have read because during the decoding process, details in the sequential process have been lost. On top of which, in order to learn to decode English, with its notoriously irregular spelling, we are required to learn lots of rules. Now rules, as any dyslexic will tell you, are only ’rules’ because there is no reason for them. If there is no reason (or meaning) we struggle to remember them. The consequence of this dry diet of phonics is a large number of dyslexic readers who may learn to bark at print (more or less) but with a limited capacity to understand or retain what they read. Consequently, I would argue that phonics, while helpful in part, should be left behind as soon as possible for dyslexic readers, like training wheels on a bicycle (as Prof Rod Nicholson said to me during a phone call), so that they can approach reading in a more meaningful and holistic way.

Interestingly, Sir Rose agreed with me, in a meeting in 2010, that restricting the teaching of reading through systematic synthetic phonics is pointless with adults, because they already employ a wide range of other (and more holistic) strategies which cannot be eliminated. I remain puzzled why he did not also recognise that children do too. Consequently, this is like forcing all children to be right handed. If your measure of success is by how well a child writes with their right hand, you can count the forced handwriting a ‘scientific success’, and have the ‘data’ to ‘prove’ it. We can imagine in this scenario, many left handed children becoming better at using their right hand, but unlikely to ever be as ‘dextrous’ as the right handers. We might then start to believe that we have discovered ‘right hand disability’ as the problem, rather than simply recognise that we are left handed. As a left handed dyslexic, this is an experience I know all too well.

Bad science is barely science at all. The answers science can produce depends firstly on the questions we ask. I am not interested in whether someone can or cannot decode words. By decode, I mean pronounce words. I am interested in whether someone can understand the words, and the simple truth is that the most direct route to understanding is through visual recognition. In Maryanne Wolfe’s Proust and The Squid (2007), she describes the process of reading over a period of milliseconds. One of those scientific observations is that readers understand the words they read before they decode them (say or sub-vocalise them). This really should have informed researchers that phonics is secondary, but no-one seemed to notice this discrepancy in the theory and practice of reading.

With Visual Reading, we recognise that accurate perception through accurate saccades dramatically improves the ability of the reader to visually recognise the meaning of words. By enabling the reader to absorb the meaning of 5 to 6 words at once, not only is speed of reading dramatically improved, but so is comprehension. On average, it takes us 5 weeks to take a struggling dyslexic reader, and turn them into reading experts. 73% are in the top 0.01% of postgraduate readers. This would simply not be possible if dyslexia was a reading disability. It is, rather, a teaching disability. One of our students said it rather eloquently. She had been struggling with her course reading. She read at 140 words per minute (wpm) with poor comprehension and recall. Five weeks later, her reading was transformed: “I can now read 600 words per minute. It’s completely re-trained my brain to read at another level as well as build my confidence and enjoyment with reading…. I now realise dyslexia is not a permanent reading disability, it just requires the correct teaching.”

I am reminded of the well known and over used phrase- “if they can’t learn the way we teach, we should teach the way they learn”. The problem seems to be that educators ignore the way we learn so as to conform to their ideological dogma. It would be particularly helpful in this context to remember that science is intended to explain our experiences, not to deny them; to inform practice, not prevent it.

References

Klein, C., & Morgan, E., (2000), Dyslexic Adult in a Non-Dyslexia World, John Wiley & Sons,

Rose, J. (2006). Independent review of the teaching of early reading final report. U.K. Department for Education and Skills. Retrieved from http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5551/2/report.pdf

Rose, J. (2009), Review of Dyslexia (Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties, Dept. Of Children, Schools and Families, UK

Vellutino,F., Fletcher, J., Snowling, M.,Scanlon, D.,Specific reading disability (dyslexia): what have we learned in the past four decades?

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45:1 (2004), pp 2–40

Wolfe, M., (2007), Proust and the Squid, Harper Collins.