<p>I thought some posters will find this article interesting:</p>
<p>[NIH-funded</a> study finds dyslexia not tied to IQ - National Institutes of Health (NIH)](<a href=“http://www.nih.gov/news/health/nov2011/nichd-03.htm]NIH-funded”>NIH-funded study finds dyslexia not tied to IQ | National Institutes of Health (NIH))</p>
<p>It is interesting- too bad our district calls it " specific learning disability" instead of dyslexia, so they can get away with not using the instruction that has shown to be successful for dyslexia.</p>
<p>Can you define that instruction?</p>
<p>local private schools and tutors use the
[SLINGERLAND</a> INSTITUTE OF LITERACY](<a href=“http://www.slingerland.org/]SLINGERLAND”>http://www.slingerland.org/)
I was able to pay for a summer program at one of the private schools for my daughter, but we didn’t have the money to continue ( and she didn’t want to leave her friends in public school)</p>
<p>Sorry to ask a very basic question, but why would anyone ever assume any correlation between intelligence and a reading disorder? They are separate issues. To me the more fascinating issue is the lower prevalence of dyslexia in many european countries . I dont have the articles at my fingertips, but this is well known, though not well understood.</p>
<p>jym626 -</p>
<p>If we use the term “dyslexia” to mean that the person has difficulty reading, then different writing systems yield different patterns of “dyslexia”. It is possible to be severely “dyslexic” in a writing system that is phonetic (think of Spanish) or semi-phonetic (think of English), but have no difficulties whatsoever with written languages that use one symbol for a word (think of Chinese), or vice versa. There is interesting work in Japan on this issue because three different writing systems are used concurrently there (Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana).</p>
<p>Sorry to ask a very basic question, but why would anyone ever assume any correlation between intelligence and a reading disorder?</p>
<p>Because from the( some) school districts point of view- if you don’t perform well in school, then perhaps you are just of lower intelligence than your classmates & they don’t need to have a learning plan or special services for you.</p>
<p>When my oldest was in K-12, her IQ was tested at 160+, but because she also has learning disabilities, she did not meet the criteria of the group administered exam for the gifted program.
Because of her talent, she also did not qualify for learning support services through the district.
You had to be at least two grades above in every subject to be considered gifted, or at least two grades below in every subject to qualify for learning support.
( they have since amended the criteria, but they still do not use IQ tests to determine potential/intelligence)</p>
<p>[Deconstructing</a> Dyslexia - TIME](<a href=“http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,102926,00.html]Deconstructing”>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,102926,00.html)</p>
<p>
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<p>My impression that Spanish is simple the way Italian is described in this very interesting article, maybe even simpler.
TBH I am glad I am a native English speaker, as English has a huge number of inconsistencies and irregularities and homonyms and idioms, due to its sourcing from several language families.</p>
<p>In Japan, children first learn the purely phonetic language first (katakana)in oreschool and kindergarten- one symbol per sound. It take them 12 years of education to learn the kanji symbols, and do not know enough kanji to read the newspaper till HS. All this is taught in a national standard curriculum.</p>
<p>Another thing about Europe, the kids learn to read very young - say by 4. And they are immediately taught cursive and read their earliest books printed in cursive. They never are taught to write in block print at all. Here we have to learn to write twice.</p>
<p>I do feel that the brain is also somewhat molded by these early experiences. Nature vs nurture!</p>
<p>Another thing about Europe, the kids learn to read very young - say by 4.</p>
<p>If you have learning differences that affect the numerous skills that are needed to read- it won’t matter if you are taught to read at 4 or 6.
Believe me,
I had one child who taught herself to read at 3, another child was just starting at 7. Both equal in intelligence, & I had even more resources with the 2nd child.</p>
<p>
Not every where - in Scandanavia kids generally don’t learn till they are seven.</p>
<p>I went to a British influence international school - we learned italics before cursive, we did not start off learning cursive.</p>
<p>Like Emeraldkity, I had one child who taught himself to read at 3 (really started at 2.5) and another who was 7.5. Their SAT critical reading scores were 10 points apart and very, very high.</p>
<p>I stand corrected about Scandinavia- they start academics no earlier than age 7, I understand.
I have lived in Japan, D1 went to a British school in London, and I have friends with children in schools all over the Continent, so I am basing my statements on this.
I was saying NOTHING about whether these methods are better or worse or helpful or damaging or…
Just showing the differences, which I find fascinating. Different kids will respond differently to the various techniques, of course.</p>
<p>I never would have even thought it was necessary to study whether a learning disability is correlated with lower IQ! I am sad to hear that needed to be analyzed.</p>
<p>As the wife and mother of dyslexics, I disagree to some extent that IQ is not impacted by dyslexia.</p>
<p>All of my sons have verbal IQ’s in the gifted range (over 130). Three of them have peformance IQs in the same range. My dyslexic son’s PIQ is about 30 points lower than the rest of the boys. The only real difference between them is the dyslexia. Although he reads at or above grade level (thanks to early intervention), he reads more slowly than his brothers and it takes him more time to formulate written responses although he is just as quick on the update orally; actually, he is known for his quick wit.</p>
<p>I have also found that dyslexics tend to be extremely bright. Our son had even been placed in K a year early because he was so smart. He was diagnosed when the reading and writing did not come the way everyone expected it to. I had him re-do K and got services right away so he is not the typical case where dyslexia isn’t diagnosed until 4th grade or later. My H was not diagnosed until law school.</p>
<p>Dyslexia by current definition is a specific reading disorder which includes impairment in pholological processing . It is disparate from intellectual functioning. The list of very bright folks with dyslexia (including Einstein, IIRC) is quite long.</p>
<p>I taught learning disabled children in the late 70s. At that time, average to above average IQ was included in the definition of learning disabled. Children with lower IQs were given a different type of instruction. The idea was that the methods used to teach learning disabled kids worked better with kids with average to above average IQ. We always looked for the skew. </p>
<p>I felt that we created a lot of learning disabilities because of the heavy emphasis on phonics in the teaching of reading. I hated the reading curriculum that we used. Little boys in particular often had trouble with auditory discrimination and blending. It would very often take care of itself as they matured a bit. I was not a fan of full day structured kindergarten for everyone across the board. Kids who had any kind of maturation delay were very susceptible to being labeled as learning disabled because of that structure.</p>
<p>Cartera,
Could English be the culprit given the inconsistency of the phonetics?
What works better than phonics??
My D’s actually responded well to phonics. There are ways to create patterns in the mind by sticking only to the “regular” words for a good while.
I think that contextual reading requires experience and vocabulary- what do you think?
You are the expert, so I am asking!!</p>
<p>I don’t think the language matters if there are true auditory processing problems. Phonics works great for the majority of kids, but those who can’t blend for example are up the creek. A kid who has trouble with auditory processing can literally repeat the sounds “cuh” “ah” “tuh” and not hear “cat”. Simple supplementation with visual learning based sight reading might be what is needed but sometimes the teaching was so constrained by the curriculum that teachers weren’t free to or didn’t have the opportunity to supplement. Some kids respond remarkably well to tactile and kinesthetic learning. </p>
<p>Yes, experience and exposure to vocabulary absolutely affects contextual reading and reading for comprehension.</p>
<p>My youngest couldn’t sound out words- but what blew me away was when she was reading out loud & she came across a word she didn’t know. she would substitute another word that fit & which was often a more difficult word, but didn’t change the meaning.
It made reading much slower, because her short term memory was poor & she had to go through her knowledge of all the words that would fit to find the right one.
That her brain could do- but she couldn’t sound out the word.</p>
<p>
Thats a good point - but the schools use this requirement as a crieteria to qualify for services. It is not diagnostic per se, but rather a crieteria for qualifications for different services. </p>
<p>Reading disorders also include impairment in reading fluency, in sound/symbol relationships. As EK described, dyslexics will often omit or substitute words when they cannot decode the one in front of them.</p>
<p>IMO, the key sentence in thearticle, which strikes me as a big “Duh, of course” is
I think that this finding comes as absolutely no surprise to the researchers or anyone who works with dyslexics (myself included) but was completed as further documentation that the old performanc/potential discrepancy models are not appropriate to discern who should qualify for intervention/services inteh schools, ans 'quote “It follows that, whether they have high IQ scores or low IQ scores, children with great difficulty in learning to read stand to benefit from educational services to help them learn to read.”
[/quote]
As others have said, it is possible that measures of IQ may be secondarily impacted by a reading impairment, especially as it impacts fluency/automaticity on some timed tasks, but it doesn’t make sense that a reading disorder per se is directly correlated with innate intelligence (hence my basic, original question in post 5).</p>
<p>We used the “skew” to diagnose. When we saw a child with average to above average intelligence who did not have emotional or psychological problems preventing him/her from learning but who couldn’t read or do math or process language correctly, that child was diagnosed as learning disabled. Of course, it was more complicated than that because lots of testing was done. It didn’t mean he or she didn’t get services -they just received different services and there were plenty to offer. Remember, this was in the 70’s when education was flush with federal money. I was a resource teacher, meaning that all the kids receiving help in my school were main streamed. We were really committed to main streaming back then. However, that required lots of support to the teachers. I had a full time aide and money was not an object. I could order any curriculum supplementation I needed. We had a full time reading specialist with an aide. We had a school psychologist and speech therapist 3 days a week and the gym teacher had a full time aide trained in providing special services. We had a full time art teacher and music teacher so I included them into my IEP for the kids because they could actually schedule one on one or small group time with them. The school psychologist for my school really partnered with me and his help was invaluable. He actually had time to do significant on site work with the kids rather than just spend his time testing. </p>
<p>My masters degree was actually in Diagnostic Prescriptive Teaching. We were the first graduating class under that model and the head of our program developed it. The program was geared towards not labeling but, insteadk figuring what each kid needed individually and providing it. That program did not square well with funding that was tied to labeling. It was only certified in New York at the time so the creator of the program, who was my professor, added an LD certification to it so we could teach elsewhere.</p>