01 NRDC Dyslexia 1-88 update - Texthelp

76
Research Report
method suited them for other reasons. Among other things, the Fernald method gives
learners an explanation for past failure and promotes morale-building. By leaving learners to
decide the words to be learned, it avoids the danger that they will be confronted with boring
or disturbing material. It thus ensures that symbols will be associated with vivid meanings. It
employs the finger-tracing method to make a kinaesthetic impression (‘the flux helps to bring
about the fusion of … orientation, visual pattern, auditory pattern’). Lastly, progress is selfpaced
by the learner.
Interventions should address both the cognitive and emotional needs of students.
Curriculum
The popular belief that developmental disorders are highly specific in their impact is not
supported by systematic enquiry. There is thus no support for any idea that successful
teaching for dyslexia, especially in the case of adults, can be accomplished by means of a
‘silver bullet’; instead, programmes may need a ‘grapeshot’ approach (Ellis et al., 1997b).
While it is clearly important for learners’ morale that existing strengths should be
acknowledged, it is recommended that a good teaching programme should focus on both the
weak and the strong skills (Wolf et al., 2000b).
What are the curricular elements of the grapeshot? One element is phonology. This is
particularly important for students who are not, for any reason, speakers of standard English
and for whom the relationships between phonology and spelling might otherwise remain
more mysterious than they need to be. Thus, while the most critical aspect of speech
perception is organising the signal as appropriate for one’s native language, rather than
getting every detail (Nittrouer, 2002), this principle might equally apply to re-organising the
signal for a non-native language or dialect (Cheung et al., 2001; Nathan et al., 1998). The
process of reorganisation might be a particularly important task for adults who have had a
specific language impairment as children (Nittrouer, 2002), although they are likely to be in a
minority among adult literacy students. It might also be an important task for students whose
childhood hearing was impaired by glue ear, even though the problem has long since been
resolved (Bennett et al., 2001).
It may be helpful to repeat that phonological awareness is not a perceptual gift with which
people may or may not be born, but rather conceptual knowledge which needs to be acquired.
Although some students can induce the alphabetic principle by implicit learning from a sightreading
vocabulary, others may acquire a sight-reading vocabulary without developing a
transferable skill (Byrne, 1998). For these students, especially if they are second-language
speakers or come from disadvantaged backgrounds, the tuition needs to be both explicit and
structured: ‘It is unfair and unethical to withhold insider information until … adults figure it
out for themselves, as if they were insiders all along’ (Purcell-Gates, 1995).
A second element is morphology. The importance of integrating phonological with
morphological knowledge has been emphasised for work with adult college students with
reading difficulties (Leong, 1999). Adult learners have been found to make a preponderance of
misspellings that are rarely made by children, including omissions, substitutions and
additions of derivational and inflectional morphemes and neglect of word endings in general
(Worthy & Viise, 1996). These findings clearly indicate morphological difficulties, in addition to
phonological coding problems (Worthy & Viise, 1996). Adult literacy students should benefit
from specific direct teaching of linguistic analysis (Worthy & Viise, 1996), with particular