(no subject)

[conuly]

New York City Plans to Screen Every Student for Dyslexia for the First Time

In Seismic Shift, NYC to Mandate Phonics-Based Curriculum in Elementary Schools

If this is implemented properly, this is all for the best. It's the "implemented properly" part that concerns me - it's my understanding that schools throughout the Anglosphere are amazingly resistant to handling dyslexia and/or dysgraphia properly, or even diagnosing it. You'll note that the first link talks about the cost of private assessment. Properly speaking, all US public school districts are supposed to assess children for learning disabilities upon request, even if the child is not enrolled in a public school, but there is a reason you end up doing a private assessment if you're seeking a dyslexia diagnosis.

And I say "schools", but of course that starts with the system and ends up at the teachers, especially in the lower grades. Maybe it's just the ones I've happened to run across in the many years of having a dyslexic niece, but there's a truly shocking number of early elementary teachers out there who will use, as their killing argument against direct instruction in a synthetic phonics program, the rhetorical question "How do you sound out the word red?" Or "me" or "car", and it should be obvious to the casual reader that while it's true that a disproportionate number of high frequency words have one or two weirdnesses that have to be learned by rote, those are not examples. Those aren't even examples of tricky words like "light", which require children to first learn that "igh" is a single phonogram.

I suppose increased access to training in Orton-Gillingham programs such as Wilson or Barton will help... but only if the city actually does fund that and teachers actually do take up that training.

Comments

[conuly]

Were you using a synthetic phonics program or an analytic one? That is, were you taught to look at the letters in order and sound them out, or were you taught to write down phonograms (letters and combinations of letters that represent sounds) and then asked to read what you had written?

The latter is generally considered the gold standard. The former, which is inexplicably more widespread, not so much.

We were "visual" learners, not audio.

This is a myth. There really is no such thing, which is why there are no studies backing up "learning styles" and a million studies debunking the idea.

It is more likely, given the speech therapy, that you had an auditory processing disorder... and very possible, if my experience in speech therapy is typical, that you were not getting the appropriate intervention for that, even with the speech therapy. (Especially given that you describe being told to "sound out the word". Did they actually sit down and tell you "To make this sound, do this with your tongue, like this diagram shows"?)

[thekumquat]

I wish there was a Like button for this comment.

My kids school taught synthetic phonics very well, kids were writing phonetically by the end of Reception (like Kindergarten), then were mostly selecting the conventional way to spell phonemes by the end of year 1.

My stepson's school? Not so much. Look And Say doesn't help if they don't know what groups of letters to look for.

[shadowkat]

That is, were you taught to look at the letters in order and sound them out, or were you taught to write down phonograms (letters and combinations of letters that represent sounds) and then asked to read what you had written?

They tried both, couldn't do either. I flip the sounds and words around. I had to use a Sight and Sound reader to learn - where pictures were above the word. Sound them out made no sense to me. I do not think that way.

(Especially given that you describe being told to "sound out the word". Did they actually sit down and tell you "To make this sound, do this with your tongue, like this diagram shows"?)

Yes, it made no sense to me. My mother was a licensed speech therapist and tried everything. And I got confused. I did not get past it until I took theater in the fifth grade - somehow it worked, maybe because it was more metaphorical and intitutive? No confusing diagrams - god, I hated those diagrams, they made no sense to me at all. I am not a literal thinker - I think metaphorically, and logically. Twirling your tongue from my perspective has zip to do with speech, it didn't connect logically in my head. It was just an illogical game. Nonsensical. The diagrams were also nonsensical. It's not how I think.

See? When I look at someone doing it - I reverse it in my head, it's like seeing things through a mirror? My mind flips things, and I have to flip to flip them back. It's very hard to explain to someone who doesn't think like this. Showing me how to do something by physically doing it yourself - does not work for me at all. If you step right, I see you stepping right. Also looking in a mirror and sounding off words is headache inducing - because I'm already seeing things as if I'm looking through reflective glass.

I remember sitting in front of speech therapists twirling their tongues at me, and asking me to mimic it to get the sound, and never getting it. I had to figure it out on my own - which I did finally, It was horribly traumatic. I remember hating speech therapy in schools, they always took me out of social studies (which I loved).

It's the problem with most academic studies - is the need to generalize. People can't be pigeon holed that neatly. We all think very differently. For example, my mother used to use board games - but I don't see the point of board games - so it didn't work at all, while theater did. Part of what is needed is something that interests the person - grabs their attention, or makes sense to them. If the person doesn't think say spatially, a diagram would be nonsensical to them.