Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD

A Global Perspective

Catherine McBride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351630986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD: A Global Perspective uniquely incorporates dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADHD into one volume, offering practical advice on how to manage each of these disorders. McBride combines a solid research base with interviews with specialists in learning disabilities, as well as parents, teachers, and students with personal knowledge of each difficulty from six continents.

The innovative cross-cultural focus of the book is emphasized in the introduction, which is followed by one chapter each on the basics of each of these learning difficulties and another three chapters on their remediation. The book goes on to cover topics such as comorbidities across learning or other difficulties, learning of multiple languages, facilitating self-esteem, and enhancing reading comprehension and writing composition in the face of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADHD. Appendices with short, practical tips on learning, multi-media resources, and ways to test and train cognitive-linguistic skills are included as an additional resource.

Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD: A Global Perspective is intended for practitioners, teachers, parents, and those with any or all of these learning difficulties. University or postgraduate students who wish to understand more about dyslexia, dysgraphia, and/or ADHD will also benefit from the clear analysis. With this book, the reader will not only come to understand the fundamental nature of these learning difficulties, but will also get to know the people whose lives are so deeply affected by them.

1
Understanding learning disabilities around the world

Dyslexia, one of the main learning disabilities recognized worldwide, can wreak havoc on one’s school performance, self-esteem, and work life and attainment. For example, Moody et al. (2000) and Wilkinson (2015) estimate that between 50% and 80% of those who are in prison may have dyslexia. Other learning disabilities which are sometimes associated with dyslexia, particularly attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dysgraphia, a specific problem with writing and spelling, can be similarly debilitating. Because so much of who one is as a child revolves around school, learning difficulties can have serious and often life-long ramifications. For example, in a survey by the U.S. National Center for Learning Disabilities (2014), 55% of those Americans with learning difficulties had had some experience with the U.S. criminal justice system within eight years following the end of secondary school. Those with learning difficulties also have more struggles in completing secondary school, getting postsecondary educational qualifications, and, consequently, landing satisfying jobs. With learning struggles often come frustration and sometimes despair. These can spill over into many aspects of life.

To illustrate this point, consider the personal narrative of one of my interviewees, Danna, a nurse and practitioner, with an additional Master’s degree in musicology. Danna is now the mother of three lovable and smart children and has a warm and supportive husband. Yet her story illustrates the heavy toll that learning difficulties such as dyslexia can have on a person over many years:

My earliest realization of my condition or weakness came around about high school. I remember the notion that the teachers respected my efforts and willingness to study, but could not explain my very average performance in school, especially in tests. Earlier than that, in elementary school, we had little awareness of the situation. I do remember that neither my teacher nor my mother thought I could be accepted to the town’s best high school. I somehow made it in, but remained very average since. There was always a major discrepancy between what I thought I knew, and learned for, and how I performed in school. My mother did not believe that I could go on to higher studies. I do remember a couple of incidents where, while I was older (in my twenties), I was one time dating a lawyer, and when my mother heard about it, she commented, “why don’t they introduce you to someone at your level?” Another time, when I willingly broke up with another person I dated (a neurosurgeon), my mother told me she thought I would never marry. My mother was very focused on studies, and when she realized I was going to be average, she destined me for average and did not consider any ability to aim higher. Neither did she consider to strengthen other talents I had like dancing, playing instruments, or acting (everything I was later known to be very good at, and developed on my own, either academically or professionally). My experience throughout childhood and adolescence was being “not smart,” and unable. No one knew or spoke of dyslexia at that age (30 years ago).

Danna’s words reflect a general sadness about her condition, largely unexplained and undiagnosed for many years. She and her husband, Joe, are now very high achievers in their respective professions, models of success in many ways. Yet clearly the childhood dyslexia Danna experienced colored her entire growing up period in some aspects, extending even to ideas from her mother about dating and marriage. Apart from the general pain of enduring a focus on weaknesses and a dismissal of strengths in her youth, Danna also had more specific episodes of recognizing her difficulties but not knowing how to get help with them. As she continues,

There was another incident when I got a very low grade, and demanded I see the exam (which required a fee). I realized that I made several mistakes (double entries and skipping lines, which were both obvious and excruciatingly painful). I was then referred to a therapist for evaluation of a learning disability, but it did not go the right direction, but focused on therapy rather than the learning disability. I never followed through (having other issues with my mother, growing up without a father, among other challenges).

While everyone with a learning disability has a different and very personal story, Danna’s narrative here echoes a nearly universal theme: Despite having particular talents and skills and being competent in various areas, those with learning difficulties often feel bewildered about their learning, and their early difficulties impact their self-esteem and developmental trajectories. In this chapter, we focus on various factors that influence how, when, and where learning disabilities manifest themselves.

Defining learning difficulties around the world

How can we understand what a learning difficulty is? When I ask colleagues around the world how dyslexia is defined in their home country, their answers vary widely. For example, in places like the Philippines and Zambia, the perception is sometimes that dyslexia represents a broader learning disability that usually includes some attentional difficulties in learning. In other places, such as Taiwan, there is a broad definition of dyslexia, including an explicit requirement about the child’s IQ (general intelligence quotient, or general reasoning); interestingly, each region of Taiwan is given the choice as to how to diagnose each child there with a variety of different tests that are often self-selected. In Israel, dyslexia is only defined at a relatively late age (grades 4 or 5, around the ages of 10 or older). In Vienna, Austria, one colleague told me that the concept of dyslexia has been influenced strongly by just a few charismatic individuals who implicate spatial skills in a way that is not part of the global mainstream idea of dyslexia. These examples illustrate the fact that the ways in which we conceptualize a learning disability must be considered from a global perspective so as to sort out what is universally at the core of dyslexia and other learning difficulties, what might be specific to a given language or script, and even what ideas are problematic, indeed wrong, for teachers, parents, students, and clinicians devoted to ameliorating learning problems.

In order to understand learning disabilities worldwide, we begin by highlighting three different influences on a child’s experience of learning difficulties. We start with aspects of language and script. These are front and center for the problems of dyslexia and dysgraphia. It is important to acknowledge that the requirements for learning to read and to write words in different languages and scripts are somewhat different, as detailed below. More broadly, we consider basic culture. Sometimes, it seems as if culture affects almost every aspect of the learner’s experience of learning disabilities. Children in Iceland, Venezuela, and Malaysia are all learning to read and to write, but their experiences of literacy and school more broadly differ widely. Culture includes general attitudes about learning and schooling and resources related to schooling. A final broad influence on learning difficulties is children’s individual approaches to learning. These include general perceptual and cognitive abilities, as well as the neurobiological aspects of learning and learning difficulties.

Culture as language and script

Whether you are reading this book as a parent, teacher, clinician, education specialist, or someone with a learning disability yourself, some of the answers on how a particular learning disability is conceptualized and treated have to do with culture and surrounding environment. John Dewey, an American philosopher, once said “A problem well put is half solved.” Here, the problem is defining precisely learning disabilities – what are they? Around the world, those focused on helping people with learning disabilities attempt to define a specific learning disability are first faced with the task of understanding the precise nature of the learning disability. In relation to problems of reading and writing words, one of the most important aspects of this has to do with the language and script of the school and society. We consider languages and scripts first in our focus on culture, since dyslexia and dysgraphia are fundamentally problems of language and script. Which languages and scripts are taught, where, and why are central questions around the world.

For example, in Zambia, in Africa, there are seven official native languages and English which are collectively used to teach early literacy; the country estimates that there are 72 languages or dialects spoken throughout the country. In the Philippines, there are two official languages (English, Filipino), and nineteen auxiliary languages (currently) as recognized by the government. These auxiliary languages are important because literacy can be taught using these in kindergarten through third grade, after which, typically, classes in school are often taught using English or Filipino. It has been estimated that in the Philippines overall, approximately 175 languages and dialects are spoken. These two situations clearly highlight the complexity that many children (e.g., Zambia with a total population of almost 17 million and the Philippines, with a total population of over 100 million) face when going to school. Although they might be learning to read in their native tongue, chances are that these children are either simultaneously learning to read not only in a language that they know but also in one that is unfamiliar to them (either English or another official language of their country). Moreover, their teachers may or may not speak the same native language as they do. When teachers and pupils have different native languages, this can lead to additional confusions.

These demands are quite different from the experiences of many children in the U.S., Italy, or Spain, where children are typically learning to read only in their native tongue, shared with their teachers, at the beginning of their schooling. In both the Zambian and Philippines examples, children are taught to read in each of the languages of instruction using the Roman alphabet only, but the sounds that are made by the same letters in different languages obviously can differ somewhat. For example, the letter J is pronounced differently in the English word jar from the German word ja (meaning yes) or from the French word je (meaning I) or from the Pinyin (phonological coding system used as an aid to learning to read Chinese) word jia (meaning family, 家). Equally, the CH letter dyad in the French word bouche (meaning mouth) is pronounced differently from the same configuration in the Chinese Pinyin word chī (meaning eat, 吃) or the German word dich (meaning you) or the English word lunch. Confusions over letters and the sounds they make in each language are inevitable in the beginning stages of reading and writing.

Sometimes, when we use the same script, we have to “unlearn” ideas in one language to read the other one correctly. For example, in English, the IE letter dyad is pronounced as (English pronunciation) I as in pie or die and the EI dyad is pronounced as A as in eight or E as in weird. In German, these pronunciations are different. As a general rule, in German, the IE dyad is pronounced as E as in Liebe (love) or Sie (she) and as I in Arbeit (work) or Ein (one). Thus, when English speakers see the name of my sabbatical university written down as Freiburg, they often pronounce the name as if it were printed as Freeburg following the convention of EI sounding like E (English pronunciation) as in weird in English. Those who know German always pronounce it more like (in English) Fryburg, however, and this is the correct pronunciation. These confusions illustrate the problem of conflict and learning and unlearning conventions. This happens when two languages share the same script and is a potentially important issue for those learning two or more languages making use of the Roman alphabet.

At the same time, one could also argue that learning to read and to write in two completely different scripts is possibly even more demanding. In my attempts at learning to read and to write Chinese characters, for example, I found the visual-spatial and memory demands of learning new strokes and radical configurations to be overwhelming at times. In India, a country with approximately 1.3 billion people, there are about 122 major languages and 1,599 other languages that are used. Beyond these staggering numbers are at least 25 different scripts, or writing systems, that must be mapped onto these languages.

In this case, you are learning a completely different system, rather than building on some aspects of what you already know. For example, although there are some conflicts in sounds across languages making use of the Roman alphabet, some of the learning may also be mutually reinforcing. Although the initial L sound in Italian (e.g., limone (lemon)), German (Licht (light)), Chinese Pinyin (laˇn (lazy, 懶)), and English (learn) likely varies a bit by language, the /l/ sound is in many ways the same across all. In contrasting Hindi with Hebrew or Chinese, one finds one’s self having to learn an absolutely separate system. Below, we consider language and script on specific dimensions to highlight the different issues that may be important to consider for those with dyslexia and dysgraphia. This next section may seem a bit technical, but it is important for considering the specifics of dyslexia and dysgraphia from a global perspective.

Dimensions of reading difficulties vis-à-vis language and script

Because dyslexia and dysgraphia, are, to some extent at least, strongly related to aspects of linguistics, it is important to note that spoken and written language are conceptualized in different ways that are relevant for understanding these difficulties. Linguistic complexity at the level of spoken language has been variously conceptualized on several dimensions (for a review, see Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi, 2012). One of these is phonological complexity, including speech-sound distinctions of the language at an individual level (e.g., a single phone distinction, such as cat vs. bat) and across the word (involving stress, lexical tone, or others). A second relates to morphological distinctions, and a third involves lexical/semantic distinctions. These are relevant to reading because readers need to understand morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, in order to be able to identify them as such. For example, in English, es or s at the end of a noun often indicates that it is plural (as in one cat and two cats or one dish and two dishes). One aspect of lexical/semantic distinctions involves sensitivity to homophones, another feature of reading and writing. When words sound the same but are written differently, it is important that we be able to distinguish them. Syntactic and pragmatic complexity are additional components of linguistic complexity overall. These final two are probably more critical for text reading than for word reading, but they are important to mention here as well. All of these concepts have practical value for teaching those with dyslexia. The first three are highlighted in Chapter 2 on dyslexia and the latter two are considered briefly in Chapter 10, which is focused on reading and writing of text.

Language and script are also related in complicated ways. There are several dimensions that impact how difficult it is to learn to read and to write that might have direct consequences for children who are dyslexic (Daniels & Share, 2018; Share & Daniels, 2015). Share and Daniels in particular have highlighted these, and the dimensions mentioned below come from these globally thinking researchers. These particular dimensions are extremely useful for understanding dyslexia around the world.

The first is linguistic distance, which is the distance between the language spoken and read by a given child. For example, although written German is relatively easy to read because letter sounds are usually pronounced consistently from one word to the next, there are many dialects of German. Some of these, including Swiss German, are substantially different in aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and even a few speech sounds used, than what appears in written form (which is high/standard German). This is a situation called diglossia, and it is common in many areas of the world, including much of the Chinese- and Arabic-speaking population. In the United States, African American English also differs substantially from standard written English as well. I have estimated, based on publications and interviews from several experts worldwide, that over 50% of the world’s children learn to read first in a language that is not their mother tongue (McBride, 2016). Having some distance between one’s spoken and written language simply makes learning to read more difficult. For example, such a mismatch may tax one’s memory (e.g., Daniels & Share, 2018), an over-arching difficulty for those with dyslexia already.

A second important aspect of dyslexia around the world is spatial arrangement and nonlinearity (Daniels & Share, 2018). This refers to how the text is presented. English readers, for example, might be used to the linear arrangements of letters in a word, sequentially from left to right, with space between the words. In many scripts, graphemes are not strictly linear but, rather, symbols in the writing system can be in various positions. In some of the scripts in India, for instance, some markings occur above or below, left or right, of the symbols. The importance of spatial arrangements for writing and reading has not been fully explored yet (e.g., Nag, Snowling, Quinlan, & Hulme, 2014), but it is likely that visual-spatial skills might be at least somewhat important for learning to read in some scripts. It is certainly the case that some scripts take longer to read and to write partly because of all of the visual-spatial features to be learned. For example, determining where a word begins and ends is not as easy in Thai or Chinese as it is in English because there are no spatial indicators (e.g., McBride-Chang, Chen, et al., 2012). Daniels and Share (2018) also mention ligaturing, or joining of letters, as particularly difficult to learn for those with dyslexia in scripts where this is done, including Arabic and Indic scripts. Although this is partly associated with the broader issue of spatial arrangements, admittedly ligaturing might also be related to other issues such as omission of certain phonological information as described later on.

Somewhat related to the issue of spatial arrangement is the dimension that Daniels and Share (2018) call visual uniformity and complexity. Some of this relates to the density of writing, and some relates to how many different visual aspects of writing are required to be integrated to be a fluent reader. For example, Chinese characters all take up the same size on the page, whether they are comprised of many or few strokes or radicals. Some characters look very simple visually and some look very visually dense. Nag (2011) noted that for some akshara scripts emerging from India, there could be approximately 400 different symbols to learn, many more than for English, though less than for Chinese, for which different individual characters number in the thousands. Daniels and Share (2018) mention this issue of set size (whether 400 in some Indian scripts or approximately 1,000 different components making up the thousands of Chinese characters, or the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet). This visual information aspect of reading has not been thoroughly explored previously, but it becomes increasingly important to do so when we think about dyslexia around the world (e.g., Chang, Chen, & Perfetti, 2018).

Another universal of potential difficulties for all children but especially those with dyslexia has to do with correspondences between the written and spoken representations of words or parts of words. For historical reasons, some languages and scripts retain the old spellings of words, spellings which, given the current pronunciations of these words, are fairly illogical. For examples, we must memorize spellings for the words know, mosquito, and fight; one could not determine the pronunciations of any of them based...