The Dyslexic Advantage

  Right off the bat, Ben was able to listen to digital text at two to three times the rate of spoken text. This was already a huge advantage, but over the next five years he became an even faster listener. “The ability to listen very quickly is built through a series of microsteps with a few significant turning points, but it’s definitely a process. It’s not like you take a pill and immediately you’re good.” Ben mentioned that one essential key to maximizing listening speed is to try many different electron voices to find the one that seems easiest to listen to.

  Ben found digital texts to be a fully adequate approach to learning. “I never touched a book in law school. I learned to abandon reading. That was the only approach that allowed me to keep up with all the assignments. I chose a totally different road than most students, because for me going through the book road was like inching over an unpaved road, while going through my alternative formats was like speeding down the autobahn.”

  Another person we spoke with who has found accelerated listening to be a big help in professional school is novelist and medical student Blake Charlton. “I’ve discovered that while I’m not a fast reader, I’m a really fast listener. I can listen quite comfortably to a lecture at three times normal speed, and I don’t have any trouble comprehending. I can back up when I don’t understand the concepts, but I rarely misunderstand the words. With the technology that’s out there, I think that learning to rely more on listening when you’re young could be a great boon for dyslexics. Recorded books helped me out a great deal when I was younger, but if I could have listened at double speed, that would have been life changing.”

  The use of technology is sometimes met with skepticism—or even active opposition—by educators and reading specialists who believe that it interferes with efforts to teach children to read. Ben Foss finds this attitude seriously misguided. “This overemphasis on early reading intervention and lack of emphasis on other aspects of reading is just so silly.” Using both remediation and accommodation is a much better approach. Let me be clear about this. I believe strongly that there’s an appropriate role for phonics training and all that, but sometimes you hit a point of diminishing returns where an hour spent doing therapies isn’t nearly as valuable as an hour spent focusing on accommodations, and where the accommodations will do much more to affect long-term outcome.

  “I’ve also found that exposure to language by itself improves literacy, which is your ability to comprehend and access literate information, as opposed to simply knowing how to read. Exposure to language improves your vocabulary, your knowledge base, and your ability to seek content that you find interesting. I’ll give you a great example. One kid got an Intel Reader, and he told us, ‘I used the Reader to read the rule book for the game Risk, and I found out my friends were cheating!’ That kid is now fired up about getting inside of texts because he’s always wanted to invade France [in Risk mode only!], and he now knows how. He’s discovered that literacy—or access to literature—is power. That’s why all kids should start out with both visual and auditory exposure to literature and literate information in all its forms.”

  In recent years a growing number of prominent educators have reached a similar conclusion. Dr. Lynda Katz is the president of Landmark College, an accredited junior college in Putney, Vermont, with a remarkable record of helping students with dyslexia, attention deficits, and other learning challenges successfully transition into college or professional school. Dr. Katz speaks enthusiastically about the hundreds of students she has observed firsthand benefitting from the use of assistive technologies. “I have an incredible bias for assistive technology. At Landmark, we began using assistive technologies as accommodations, but I really think they’re remedial—that is, that their use improves reading function. I’ve had so many students who’ve used them who when they get ready to leave Landmark feel like they just don’t need them as much. The assistive devices and the exposure to texts they bring really seem to enhance students’ literacy skills and improve their reading. Drill and drill and drill just doesn’t seem the way to go.”

  We wish every school would take this more balanced and flexible view of assistive technologies like recorded books and text-to-speech software—particularly for students who are still working to improve their decoding and reading fluency skills. This two-pronged approach gives students with dyslexia the same opportunities to expand their general knowledge base, enrich their vocabulary, and improve their other high-level literacy skills that other students already enjoy. It would likely also—as Ben Foss and Lynda Katz have noted—improve the speed with which they master reading skills.

  Finally, parents can play a special role in creating a home environment that encourages greater literacy for struggling readers. Studies have shown that children whose parents engage them in conversations about important and challenging topics at home adapt more quickly to learning from literate texts. Parents should also make sure struggling readers are given access to the material in books by reading aloud to them, and by providing exposure to technologies like books on tape, text-to-speech reading programs, or worthwhile documentary films.

  Summary of Key Points on Reading

  • Skilled reading requires strengths in decoding, fluency, and comprehension.

  • Dyslexic students require extra practice to build decoding skills, and the most effective practice involves explicit training in phonics and phonological awareness.

  • Orton-Gillingham–based methods are the gold standard for such practice, though individuals with dyslexia who have more severe difficulties with sound discrimination may also benefit from computer-based auditory training.

  • Orton-Gillingham–based methods come in a wide variety of forms, but all achieve their success in part by turning learning into a memorable experience. The particular “flavor” should be chosen to match well with a student’s cognitive strengths (including MIND strengths) and interests.

  • Fluency training employs both oral and silent reading practice to improve word identification, problem solving, and reading speed. Reading materials should be chosen that grab the student’s attention (often by covering an area of special student interest), use straightforward sentences, and employ familiar vocabulary. Dyslexic students’ big-picture reasoning skills should also be tapped by providing them context for what they’ll be reading (by first reading the passage to them or giving them a brief summary).

  • Dyslexic students often possess cognitive strengths that will enable them to become good interpreters of texts, once barriers to accessing the words in the text are removed.

  • In addition to reading instruction, dyslexic students should be given access to recorded books and text-to-speech technology, so their exposure to literate information and their cognitive development can proceed at full speed.

  • Newer technologies often permit “speed listening,” which can greatly improve the usefulness and attention-holding ability of recorded texts.

  • Parents can play an important role in turning the home into an environment that encourages literacy for struggling readers by engaging children in challenging conversations and providing access to literacy-building alternatives to print, such as books on tape, text-to-speech reading programs, or worthwhile documentary films.

  CHAPTER 26

  Writing

  Many individuals with dyslexia have the potential to become not only competent but even highly skilled writers. In previous chapters, we’ve introduced you to several dyslexic individuals who, despite early challenges with reading and writing, have gone on to become extremely talented writers. This pattern is far more common than many people realize.

  Typically, when individuals with dyslexia fully develop their writing skills, their mature writing reflects many of the MIND strengths we’ve described, including the abilities to see distant and unusual connections and associations; view things from different perspectives; see big-picture gist and context; show strengths in scene-based memory and imagery; think in cases and episode
s rather than in abstract definitions or generalizations; and engage in mental simulation, prediction, and insight, to see patterns that others often miss. These abilities often begin to show up in the writing of individuals with dyslexia during adolescence and young adulthood, though many dyslexic individuals hit their full stride as writers only during their early to mid twenties, or even later.

  Even individuals with dyslexia who ultimately become highly skilled writers will nearly always struggle early in school with the fine-detail features of writing. These difficulties can affect functions like the physical and mechanical skills needed for legible and accurate handwriting; the rule- and sound-based patterns underlying spelling and grammar; the structural and organizational patterns underlying sentence, paragraph, and essay construction; and understanding which details to include and exclude in their writing. For most individuals with dyslexia, fluent and automatic mastery of these skills requires much more time to achieve than it does for other students. Often, it also requires more explicit instruction and greater practice imitating good writing as well.

  In this chapter, we’ll discuss steps that can help dyslexic students become competent or even highly skilled writers. We’ll focus on several important levels of writing and on the role that both technology and the proper use of dyslexic advantages can play in helping dyslexic students develop their writing abilities.

  Writing by Hand

  Learning to write by hand is often a major challenge for children with dyslexia. Severe problems with handwriting are common among younger dyslexic students. Though Blake Charlton is now an accomplished novelist, he struggled greatly with handwriting: “In special ed class I failed a lot of papers because the teacher couldn’t read anything I wrote.”

  Problems writing by hand can affect any student with dyslexia, but they’re often most severe for students with significant working memory or procedural learning challenges. Writing by hand depends almost entirely on automatic, fine-detail skills. These skills allow us to form letters neatly, consistently, and in the proper spatial orientation; properly space letters and words; use margins; and master conventions (like capital letters) and punctuation (like commas and periods). Students who haven’t fully mastered these automatic handwriting skills must use conscious attention (working memory) to perform them. As a result, they have less “mental desk space” left over for formulating sentences, organizing thoughts, or checking for errors, so their work is often littered with overload mistakes—that is, with more frequent or severe mistakes in spelling, word omissions, inaccurate word substitutions, poor mechanics, improper grammar or syntax, or just general messiness.

  Students who struggle to write by hand usually need a combination of specific training (remediation) and accommodations. Training should begin using a program of explicit, rule-based, multisensory approaches to letter formation. Our favorite program is Handwriting Without Tears (www.hwtears.com), which resembles the Orton-Gillingham approaches we discussed in the last chapter by taking advantage of spatial and kinesthetic imagery strengths and using multisensory practice to turn instruction into a more memorable experience. This approach is often administered in schools (sometimes through a school-based occupational therapist), but because it’s relatively easy to understand, parents can use it with their children at home as well.

  Children with especially poor finger coordination will sometimes benefit from working with an occupational therapist who has been trained to help children with handwriting problems. Many dyslexic children—especially those with procedural learning challenges—show poor fine-motor coordination problems and low muscle tone in the core muscles of their spine, hips, and shoulders, all of which makes prolonged seatwork difficult. These children often benefit from core muscle strengthening in addition to fine-motor (finger) training.

  As we discussed in chapter 7, children who invert their written symbols so frequently or elaborately that it holds back their progress in writing or reading (particularly past age eight or nine) deserve special attention. Interventions should be based on the child’s MIND strength profile. Since many of these students have tremendous M-strengths (or spatial reasoning and imagery abilities), these talents should be used to minimize symbol flipping. It’s often helpful for these students to practice forming three-dimensional clay models of letters and short words (especially words containing the letters that are often flipped). They can also practice letter formation by making very large letters (two or more feet in height) with a marker on a whiteboard or by using their hand to trace out the letters in a box filled with sand or rice. These practices engage their large motor muscle (kinesthetic) memory and activate broader areas of the cortex, which seems to improve spatial orientation. Helpful techniques of this kind are also described in the books Unicorns Are Real 1 and The Gift of Dyslexia.2

  Many dyslexic students appear to have preset limits in how neatly and automatically they can learn to write by hand—even with extensive training—and they eventually reach a point of diminishing returns where further progress is hard to achieve. Students who reach this point should be treated with understanding and respect, since their limitations reflect brain biology rather than effort. Even those who do eventually learn to write well by hand often don’t achieve full comfort or fluency with handwriting until mid to late adolescence—or even young adulthood. This again is a result of their late blooming in working memory and language, and it’s important that parents and educators understand and make allowances for this time frame of development. Fortunately, because many excellent technologies now exist to provide alternatives to writing by hand, there is simply no need for students with especially persistent handwriting difficulties to suffer. We’ll discuss these alternatives later in this chapter.

  Writing Sentences

  Many individuals with dyslexia also have difficulty learning to write at the sentence level. One common problem is learning to master the rules of grammar and syntax, which dictate how words relate to each other and function in sentences. These include the rules for:• subject and object relationships (The man walked his dog down the street versus The man down the street walked his dog versus The man’s dog walked down the street)

  • active and passive constructions (The king kissed the queen versus The queen was kissed by the king)

  • tenses (Yesterday we went to the drugstore, but today we’re going to the mall, and tomorrow we’ll go to the restaurant)

  • pronouns (He gave his wife’s sister her husband’s letter)

  • relative clauses (The man that is pulling the woman pulls the dog versus The man is pulling the dog, and he is also pulling the woman)

  • other grammatical features like prepositions, adjectives and adverbs, multiple word meanings, and complex constructions

  As many as half of all college students with dyslexia have been shown to struggle with grammar and syntax—and that only includes students who’ve done well enough to make it to college! Typically, these students can write sentences with simple “active subject/passive object” formats but struggle as sentences grow more complex.

  Experts on dyslexia often don’t classify these language issues as part of “dyslexia” per se but as “dyslexia-related language learning differences.” However, since these challenges really do appear to result from the same neurological variations as the dyslexic reading challenges we’ve already discussed, and since mild challenges of this sort occur in many individuals with dyslexia, we believe it’s important to discuss them.

  These subtle language challenges are often missed on routine evaluations of language function in younger primary school students, so a “clean bill of health” on a brief language evaluation doesn’t rule them out. Also, these challenges are often much more apparent with writing than speaking, since writing demands both greater precision and a greater use of working memory resources.

  Challenges with working memory and procedural learning are often the chief contributors to dyslexic problems with sentence construction. One of the lead
ing experts on dyslexia-related language and writing challenges is Dr. Charles Haynes, professor of communication sciences at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions in Boston. When we asked Dr. Haynes where he believed dyslexic students face their greatest challenges with writing, he didn’t hesitate. “The sentence is really an overlooked area. When teaching sentences, people think primarily of sentence diagramming, but that’s really not what many of our children with dyslexia and related language learning disabilities need. These children often haven’t grasped the sense of a sentence—or the logic that underlies sentences—so they need practice comprehending and formulating sentences, rather than just diagramming.”

  Notice how this focus on the logic or meaning of the sentence as a whole is a top-down approach. The student begins at the “top,” by deciding what purpose the sentence as a whole should perform (e.g., to explain, to describe) rather than at the “bottom,” by focusing on details like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Based on what we’ve discussed about the thinking styles of students with dyslexia, this top-down or big-picture approach is precisely the kind we would predict would be most effective to help them learn. Yet this approach is almost exactly the opposite of the bottom-up approach that’s usually used to teach sentence construction (e.g., start with the noun you want the sentence to be about, now add a verb to show what it’s doing, now add another noun to show what it’s doing it to, and so on).

  According to Dr. Haynes, one key type of practice that students with dyslexia need is to learn the specific sentence formats that are logically linked to particular types of paragraphs. As he told us, “Sentences, especially complex sentences, have a logic. For example, if you form a compound sentence using the word and, there’s a logic to that: sentences with and mean you’re talking about similar events or events that follow in sequence. With all the types of sentences, there are particular sets of words that you use for certain purposes.”