01 NRDC Dyslexia 1-88 update - Texthelp

Developmental dyslexia in adults: a research review 83
years. Their measured IQs ranged from 94 to 135, with a mean of 106. They had been
diagnosed as ‘learning disabled’ by means of various ability-achievement discrepancy criteria.
In a summer school programme lasting for five weeks, ten of the students were taught by an
‘alphabetic synthetic multisensory phonetic’ method incorporating alphabetic knowledge,
letter sounds and blends, syllable division, directionality and simultaneous reading, spelling
and handwriting.
A comparison group of ten students was taught by a method which did not attempt to teach
individual letter sounds or to integrate the teaching of spelling, reading and handwriting. A
further group of ten students did not attend the summer school.
Data analyses showed that the reading scores of the Orton-Gillingham group improved more
over the programme period than those of the other two groups, with a mean improvement of
approximately one and a half grades (or academic years).
Dyslexia and psychodynamics: a case study of a dyslexic adult (Migden, 1990)
The subject of this study was a 33 year-old with an IQ in the normal range. He had a history of
alcoholism, emotional outbursts and difficulty in sustaining relationships with other people. He
was dependent on his parents, with whom he lived, for help with literacy tasks. Previous
interventions (including private tutors, optometric training, child psychotherapy and medical
consultations) had been ineffective in helping him develop his literacy skills.
Weekly psychotherapy ran concurrently with a twice-weekly literacy programme that involved
use of a ‘speak and spell’ machine. To help the student to sublimate his aggressive impulses,
his psychotherapist encouraged him to read books of two kinds: books on the problems of
growing up with a disability, books about guns, rifles and weapons of war. Just as
psychotherapy helped the student’s learning, it appeared that learning was helping his
psychotherapy.
The literacy programme ended after two years, when the student had attained his goals. He
later earned a high school diploma and started a family of his own. The study endorses what
might be intuitive: that students with multiple problems are most likely to make progress when
all of those problems are being addressed. However, it also suggests that, no matter how
understanding a basic skills tutor might be, she or he may need to collaborate with other
professionals in helping students whose learning difficulties have caused problems in other
aspects of their lives.
Task-determined strategies of visual process (Geiger et al., 1992)
These studies took place following the discovery that an atypical subgroup in a study of visual
lateral masking had previous diagnoses of dyslexia. The purpose was to determine whether
the information necessary for reading could be blunted by misuse of a normal visual process
and whether any blunting could be relieved by suitably-designed practice in normal lateral
masking strategies.
The participants in the first study were ten ‘ordinary’ readers and ten with severe dyslexia. The
‘ordinary readers’ were university students, while the dyslexics were volunteers from various
backgrounds. After this study had confirmed that ordinary readers recognise letters best in and
near the centre of gaze, whereas severe dyslexics recognise letters farther in the periphery in
the direction of reading, an intervention study took place. An intervention case-study of a