Dyslexia in Italy

I had posted the following article on 12.1.2012 and decided to repost it here today.A question that comes to my mind is: What did researchers do about this report?
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Yesterday a reader commented in my article dated February 20th 2010. I have copied the article he has referred to.  This article says that the reading difficulty is a brain disorder which I disagree with. This is similar to saying that a left hander has a brain disorder. It is simply that dyslexics think and learn in a different way than the majority of the population just like left handers do things differently than the majority of the population. Would anyone dare say that people like Tom Cruise, Lee Kuan Yew, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Gates , Steven Spielberg and many other dyslexics have a brain disorder.

Following is the article in full.

Dyslexia doesn't exist in Italy like it does in the U.S. and England!

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that manifests itself as a difficulty with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5% to 17% of the U.S. population.

Dyslexia is thought to be the result of neurological defect, and though not an intellectual disability, it is variously considered a learning disability, a language disability, and a reading disability, among others. Dyslexia is diagnosed in people of all levels of intelligence.

A STUDY of dyslexic adults has shown that simplifying English spellings could be one way to help sufferers.

It also confirmed that the cause of the reading difficulty was a brain disorder. Experiments show for the first time that the neurological cause of dyslexia is the same in sufferers across Europe. But the disorder appears to be twice as common in the U.S. and England as in Italy/Spain because English has a more complex writing system, or orthography, than Italian/Spanish, which are more phonetic.

French, English, Spanish and Italian adult dyslexics all did equally poorly in tests that involved short-term memory, whereas Italian/Spanish dyslexics did better in reading tests.

The head of the team, Prof Eraldo Paulesu, of the University of Milan Bicocca and the Institute San Raffale, said: "There is an argument for reforming complex orthographies to improve literacy problems in these languages. English dyslexics would have an easier life if their writing system was more regular, with more unique correspondences between sounds and print."

Learning disabilities and dyslexia Part 2

Over the past 8 years I have taught 26 dyslexic students. Most of them were certified dyslexics by experts in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Among all the 26 students, only 2 had exceptional problems with mathematics. I have also taught one student mathematics. She is an intelligent girl and was very fluent in her English and could read more fluently than most students in her school but had problems grasping mathematics. She READ FLUENTLY and as such she cannot be dyslexic. But she had a problem with mathematics. Would it be proper to call her dyslexic just because some Association decides to include dyscalculia and dysgraphia under the dyslexia umbrella?

To teach or not to teach - Phonics

                                                                     

One of my first students, a girl refused to say the word fox despite being repeatedly asked to repeat after me. I have written about this in my article dated 17th February 2010. Children prone to disengaging shut down when something illogical is taught to them.

My student refused to say the word fox as she had learnt from her former tuition teacher that the phoneme for the letter 'f' is “Fur/Fer”. As such, to her, the word fox cannot be sounded out the way I had sounded it out. If the alphabet ‘F’ carried the sound fer/fur then the word ‘fox’ must be sounded out as ‘fur-ox’. As such she had refused to say it the way I had pronounced it.

Now, I would have expected this kind of wrong teaching of phonemes in countries where English is taught as a second language. However, I just found out that it is rampant in the US, Australia and the UK too. No wonder the rate of illiteracy in these countries is on the increase.

Dyslexia and maths

Not all individuals with dyslexia have problems with mathematics. I have, however, seen a few dyslexic students who don’t seem to understand mathematics.

Individuals with dyslexia who have difficulty with mathematics are quite often misdiagnosed as having dyscalculia. Some children with dyslexia have problems with mathematics because what they have been taught makes no sense to them. Most teachers hardly take the time and trouble to make sure that these children do understand the basic principles. This seems to be the same problem with them learning how to read in English. Their basic problem is that they do not understand and their minds shut down.

Factors affecting Dyslexic people

In March this year I read an article in Steadyhealth.com. You may read the full article by clicking on the link below.

http://ic.steadyhealth.com/dyslexia_barriers_to_learning.html

I have copied a section from that article as shown below. I made 2 comments and have yet to receive any reply. I would be grateful if any of you can please give me your comments.

Tom Cruise - Dyslexics can be taught to read

I have come back after a very long absence from blogging. I hope to write here again when I find some interesting things to write or comment on.

No one who has seen Jerry Maguire, The Last Samurai, mission Impossible or Top Gun would believe that Tom Cruise struggles with reading. He always seems to deliver his lines flawlessly.

Cruise says he was diagnosed as dyslexic at seven, and tried to hide his learning disability from the other children at school. He has described his younger self as "a functional illiterate", through high school and his first several films. Explaining how such a functionally illiterate man can possibly make a good impression at auditions, Cruise said, "I'd get the director and producer to talk about the characters and the film. I'd glean information from them and I'd use that... I got pretty good at ad-libbing".