The thread has swung toward the topic of dyslexia, so I just have to add my two cents. Dyslexia is a main interest of mine.
I agree that many cases of "dyslexia" are actually incidences of "dysteachia" (i.e., lack of good reading instruction), or simple lack of exposure to books and literacy activities. However, there really are other reasons people can have trouble reading. Dyslexia as a disorder does exist.
The core deficit of many people with dyslexia is speed of processing. They can have trouble rapidly linking letters to sounds, and trouble linking word pieces or whole words to sounds as well. In addition, many people with dyslexia have a slight but important difficulty processing and producing sounds (vowels, in particular). It's not that they have a foreign accent, but the sound differences can be detected on a spectrogram.
Then you have other problems that can make dyslexia worse, such as attention deficits, impulsivity, a language learning disorder, etc.
If you want to know more about dyslexia, I recommend checking out the International Dyslexia Association website (www.interdys.org, I'm pretty sure...). The British Dyslexia Association is really great, too.
Cheers,
-EH
Help me!!(three ways to spell the same sound "f")
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
a few random comments
Going back to the original question, there is fourth way to spell /f/. It is {ff}. In general we use the {ff} with short vowels and the {f} with long vowels and diphthongs.
Working in the public schools this year it is my experience that labeling someone "dyslexic" is very difficult to do. There are some very strict guidelines, and I would be very surprised if a student was given this label by mistake. More likely, students who have it are being overlooked.
The discussion has also shown a very common problem in ESL teacher education: not many ESL teachers know much about teaching reading. There are many ways that teachers have historically tried to teach students to read English, and the take-home lesson is that you need a combination of methods, including so-called "phonics," "word recognition," and "whole language." It really disappoints & frustrates me that ESL textbooks (at least for adults) seem to completely skip the decoding skills and expect the students to simply pick it up. This is perhaps because these students are assumed to be literate in their native languages. But it poses a problem for almost all students including: students who have never learned to read in their first language, students whose native languages are not written with a Roman alphabet, and even for the students who do use Roman alphabets--despite similarities, English is still a world of its own.
Working in the public schools this year it is my experience that labeling someone "dyslexic" is very difficult to do. There are some very strict guidelines, and I would be very surprised if a student was given this label by mistake. More likely, students who have it are being overlooked.
The discussion has also shown a very common problem in ESL teacher education: not many ESL teachers know much about teaching reading. There are many ways that teachers have historically tried to teach students to read English, and the take-home lesson is that you need a combination of methods, including so-called "phonics," "word recognition," and "whole language." It really disappoints & frustrates me that ESL textbooks (at least for adults) seem to completely skip the decoding skills and expect the students to simply pick it up. This is perhaps because these students are assumed to be literate in their native languages. But it poses a problem for almost all students including: students who have never learned to read in their first language, students whose native languages are not written with a Roman alphabet, and even for the students who do use Roman alphabets--despite similarities, English is still a world of its own.