01 NRDC Dyslexia 1-88 update - Texthelp

88
Research Report
We end with answers to the questions with which we began. It appears that:
There are many reasons why people find it difficult to learn how to read, write and spell.
With some learners, we identify the causes of their difficulty as predominantly a matter of
experience.
With other learners, we conjecture that the causes of their difficulty are predominantly a
question of biology.
Either way, we acknowledge that developmental outcomes reflect interactions between
experience and the human organism.
The research on ‘developmental dyslexia’ in children can help adult literacy tutors to
respond to the needs of adult students, insofar as the research addresses fundamental
issues in language acquisition.
It is by no means certain that the categorical distinctions embodied in terms such as
‘dyslexic’ and ‘non-dyslexic’ correspond to distinct realities when the individual person
(rather than the behaviour) is the unit of analysis.
In our present state of knowledge, it does not appear to be helpful for tutors to think of some
of their students as ‘dyslexics’ and of others as ‘ordinary poor readers’.
The screening of adult literacy students for ‘dyslexia’ is difficult to justify on either
theoretical or practical grounds.
By contrast, the psychometric assessment of reading-related skills is essential and every
adult literacy teacher should be competent in it.
Even if dyslexia were to prove categorically rather than dimensionally different from ordinary
poor reading, tutors are not resourced to determine the issue and screening tests yield high
rates of false positives.
Telling a tutor that a student is ‘dyslexic’ may elicit a number of inappropriate assumptions
about the student’s problems and abilities.
The research does not indicate that a different curriculum should be followed for ‘dyslexics’;
the curriculum will depend very much on the needs of each individual student.
The research does not indicate that ‘dyslexics’ and ‘ordinary poor readers’ should be taught
by different methods; however, the methods promoted as specialist interventions for
dyslexics are well-suited to be mainstream methods of reading instruction, which is how
they originated.
‘Dyslexia’ is not one thing but many, to the extent that it may be a conceptual clearing-house
for a variety of difficulties with a variety of causes.
Different explanations of ‘dyslexia’ indicate different responses to the difficulties of different
‘dyslexic’ students, but the evaluation research on these responses is very limited.