“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ideas. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain
One such great giant is Dr. Joe Torgesen. He took his valuable
time to respond to my many emails. We did not see eye to eye and I now
understand why.
(This is a mighty long email but I have decided not to break
it down into 2 or 3 parts. However, there is more to write on this and I will
write after my short leave I am taking from today)
I forgot the emails to and fro Dr.Joe Torgesen in 2010 where
I had maintained that dyslexics are not a result of ‘Phonological awareness
deficit’.
A friend of mine from US who teaches dyslexic kids wrote to
me and said that she agreed with me on most of what I write on and added that
we shall agree to disagree on ‘Phonological awareness deficit’ not being the
cause of dyslexics not being able to read.
We continued with our dialogue on Messenger and she did say that
not all her ‘dyslexic’ students have a ‘Phonological awareness deficit’. She has
yet to tell me as to how many of her students have a problem with phonological
awareness.
It was after this dialogue that my emails to Dr. Joe Torgesen
came to mind.
I quote part of one of the emails I received from him in
2010:
I'm not sure why your observations are so
different than others--perhaps you need to collect some objective evidence on
your students, including good assessments of their phonemic awareness,
grapho-phonological knowledge, phonemic decoding ability, sight word knowledge,
and reading fluency before, during and after your interventions. If you
did that over a period of year, you might be able to build up a solid data base
from which to make your arguments, particularly if you had parallel data for
those learning to read in English and other languages.
In another email Dr. Joe Torgesen said:
“We may be seeing different parts of the
elephant, and so have different views about its basic nature. However, I
would encourage you to continue to collect data and examples if you want to
convince others of your beliefs.”
Now it all
seems to fall in place. Here are the ‘dots’ and I will let you connect them.
Let me again
quote what Nancy Hennessy the
president of the International
Dyslexia Association
(IDA) from 2003-2005 said:
“……even if we settle on a middle
number, let us say 10%; that still
leaves a lot of children who are not dyslexic, whose brains are not wired any
different way, who have reading difficulty.
We are not supporting the learning of
our teachers in order for them to do what we are talking about
We still don’t have the capacity nor
the will to change what it is that we are doing with reading early on and so
consequently unless we make those significant changes we are not only going to
lose the dyslexics but I am also
concerned about these other children; these other struggling readers.”
I believe Dr. Joe Torgesen is speaking about the 10% (I
believe it is much lower than 10% and a more accurate figure would be between 2
to 3% based on researchers as we will see below) whilst I am speaking about
“these other struggling readers” who I believe are a majority of kids classified
as dyslexics.
Here is a comment from a post in LinkedIn by a LinkedIn member:
Comment: “…a
large group are saying there is no such thing as Dyslexia-that dream team:)
What would the stats be re Dyslexia if we taught with the above day one? Do you
have an opinion?”
Author’s
response: “I believe that if developmentally-appropriate reading instruction
was implemented explicitly and systematically that 90% of struggling readers'
needs could be met in general education using an RTI model. Not only would
struggling readers be well served, but traditional, emerging readers would
learn to read more efficiently, and the teacher would feel empowered. It's a
win-win-win for all involved.”
Of course, the response above is
promoting some ‘wares’ but I have always maintained that if teachers know how
to teach the sound symbol skills correctly and inform kids from the onset that
letters have more than one sound then close to 98% of struggling readers needs
could be met and there won’t be any disengaged students in grade one.
Dr. Joe Torgesen is probably talking
about the remaining 2%.
Here is another quote from Children
of the Code:
Dr.G Reid Lyon: When we look at the kids who are having a tough time
learning to read and we went through the statistics, thirty-eight percent nationally,
dis-aggregate that, seventy percent of kids from poverty and so forth hit the
wall. Ninety-five percent of those kids are instructional casualties. About
five to six percent of those kids have what we call dyslexia or learning
disabilities in reading. Ninety-five percent of the kids hitting the wall in
learning to read are what we call NBT: Never Been Taught.
I am talking about the ‘95% of kids hitting the wall’ and I
can now relate this to Dr. Joe’s “We may be
seeing different parts of the elephant…”
Here are extracts from COTC of an interview with Siegfried Engelmann:
It cost, I don't know, hundreds of
millions.... [the] net result was that the results of [project] "Follow
Through" were suppressed.
Siegfried Engelmann: Yeah. I mean, it was the
biggest part. But the suppression was intentional. It was contrived. It
didn't just happen. The fact that the whole project failed, that the overall
statements of the primary sponsors were true, did not necessarily mean that every
one of them failed. That certainly was not the case.
Siegfried Engelmann: Well, yeah, from the
beginning, that was our motto, and it offended a lot of traditional educators.
But it was: If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught,
and that it's not a question of the learner's ability, it's a question of
the teacher's ability. These kids are capable of learning, certainly at
different rates, but learning anything we want to teach them.
David Boulton: Yes, the way I've always looked at it is that “any child could learn anything if we could meet them on the edge
of what it is they need to stay engaged in the learning”.
My
comment: Who suppressed the “Follow Through” study and for what purpose? Are
Siegfried and Boulton not saying the same thing I have been saying?
More
importantly are the educators not suppressing my findings by saying it is not
scientifically based?
What
has happened to good old ‘common sense’?
What
has happened to logical thinking?
David Boulton: Which, to some
degree speaks to a major part of the problem with reading in general. This is
what we're teaching children, or at least many parents are when they first
expose their kids to letters. We act as if letters have this definitive,
one-to-one kind of correspondence with sounds. Sesame Street does that and
books and crib mobiles and everything else, as if letters have definitive
sounds.
Siegfried Engelmann: And the mistakes that
the kids made guided us to see that we had something missing. For instance, at
first we had them sound out words traditionally. We never permitted
"ch-aa-tah” for chat. Unvoiced sounds were unvoiced -- "ch-a-t."
Well, they showed us through their responses that that stop sound beginning was
really hard for them.
So now we had precise corrections that
related to what they had learned earlier. We had a procedure for sounding it
out that would reach virtually 100 percent of the kids. So we could teach even
really low performers now to take the first step on the ladder. Then they can
follow the entire sequence and they can learn at a rate far faster than would
have been anticipated.
My
response: That has been my Mantra since 2010. Teach kids the proper pronunciation of phonemes of the consonants.
David Boulton: Well, today, my
understanding from the National
Center of Learning Disabilities, and Reid
Lyon et all, is that less than five to six percent of the children in
this country have anything innately neurobiological that underlies their
processing problems. For the rest of the kids the problem is
instructional confusion.
Siegfried
Engelmann: I would say that it is closer
to like maybe one-fourth or a fifth of one percent. No kidding. I mean,
I've worked with a couple of kids...
David Boulton: Well, is this based
on your experience or based on some research you've had access to?
Siegfried
Engelmann: Well, I've worked with
hundreds of kids.
David Boulton: You mean hundreds
of kids that were labeled as having some learning disability or dyslexia, that
once you met them the right way, given the way that they had adapted to the
teaching that they had had, you were able to pull them through it?
Siegfried Engelmann: Right.
David Boulton: Oh, it's beautiful.
I totally get that. I totally agree with that. So the intention is to
intentionally bring about their error and help them connect the strategy that's
implicit in their error making and learn through that into the mode of
participation that will go past the error to the correct approach.
My comment: Prevent that error from happening. Get it right
from the word ‘GO’. Why feed someone poison and then give them medication to
‘cure’ their illness?
Here is something relevant I read a few days ago from Dr.Selznick’s blog.
1.10.2017
“Identifying a label for student’s type of
learning disability is not the key issue. Use of the label dyslexia
may not even be necessary. Describing the phenomena observed in the child
should be the goal of the diagnostic assessment, especially in an area as
muddled as this one.”
If it is decided to use the
diagnostic label dyslexia, then it is critical to identify, the particular
symptoms the student exhibits”. (Regina Richards, in “Dyslexia Testing: A
Process Not a Score”)
If I say “the child is dyslexic,” I’m not sure that
tells me what to do next.
What’s the nature of the difficulty? What are
we targeting? Where is the zone of competence? How mild, moderate
or severe is the problem.
There are so many more dots to connect but for now let me
end with what Tim Conway Ph.D. said in a comment (see my previous post) on this:
“What was not stated in my TEDx
talk is that our 5-year, and $1Million US study on early intervention of
reading disabilities showed that if the “NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language,
Reading and Spelling” program were implemented in classrooms across the USA,
then 97.6% of students would read on grade level by grade 2.”
Most of these guys are only keen on marketing their ‘wares’
but the message is clear.
I am grateful to Dr. Joe Torgesen, Prof. James Chapman, Dr.
David Kilpatrick and Dr. Richard Selznick for having indulged me when I
wrote to them.
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