Specific Reading Disability, also known as SRD, is a condition in which an individual displays reading difficulty that results primarily from neurological factors. Popularly known as dyslexia, it is a brain-based type of learning disability that normally impairs a person’s ability to read. Contrary to popular thinking, the majority of people suffering from dyslexia are of normal intelligence. Dyslexia is a condition normally detected in the early years of schooling as it manifests itself through difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly and writing words.
Dyslexia is a condition that affects between four to seven percent of the global population, a very high figure. The reason for the less reported cases compared to the actual number of people it affects is due to lack of knowledge in the public domain and thus the general assumption that the student or child’s literacy levels are low. This could not be distant from the truth. Research shows that there is no direct or significant correlation between dyslexia and low literacy levels. Genetic and environmental factors can cause any learning disability.
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Dyslexia or Specific Reading Disability is something that can be handled and effectively managed. The fact that it is easily detectable especially in the early stages of childhood plays a huge role in it being able to be treated. Several signs that might point towards a later determination of dyslexia include a lack of phonological awareness and delayed onset of speech, as well as being easily distracted by background noise. This is called the diagnostic phase as it is here that it can be diagnosed and subsequently an appropriate treatment regimen set up. The diagnostic phase includes the carrying out of tests followed by the evaluation of these tests. Research shows that one in five students suffers persistent reading difficulties.
The second part encompasses the correction or repair of any such reading disabilities or diagnoses. This is referred to as intervention or remediation as the teachers have to implement a suitable technique to aid the student to be able to perceive the same information differently and thus maintain a normal learning curve as those not suffering from dyslexia. There is a vast array of remediation methods and intervention techniques available to an institution or to what is referred to as a reading teacher, which basically means a teacher of Specific Reading Disabled children. The main obstacle surrounding the treatment phase of dyslexia is perhaps the fact that there is no singular remedy. Perhaps this might also be an advantage as it provides for many solutions.
Research in this area aims to provide empirical evidence for and against each of the three main approaches used in remediation. The first intervention method is called the process approaches which aim at training visual and auditory perceptual skills with the aim of producing overall literacy gains in the students suffering from the reading disability (Denton et al., 2013). The Process Approaches is the most general approach used as it basically trains pre-requisite skills which include reading and spelling and is thus the only approach that can be used on all those suffering from dyslexia. This approach operates under the assumption that literacy failure is caused by a defect in one of those two abilities, reading or spelling. This intervention method, therefore, posits that if the particular areas of a defect in the readers are correctly identified and subsequently addressed then an improvement in reading and spelling is expected. While this argument holds water at first glance, the empirical evidence does not outrightly support it. The solution of this approach is based on solving visual and auditory perceptual difficulties. This is because it is assumed that visual perception is the essential feature of the learning process. Empirical evidence, however, shows that there is no significant correlation between visual perceptual skills and literacy.
The Specialist Methods is the next remediation approach. It focuses on a single, global teaching strategy for all SRD children or students. This intervention method operates under the assumption that SRD is a homogeneous problem and that the problems occur from a singular source. This argument has however been criticized from the standpoint that different underlying problems should give rise to different results. The third approach is the modality or treatment interaction methods. This method assumes that the auditory and visual modalities are critical to literacy acquisition, but due to their complex interaction, there may exist several possible areas of difficulty in different readers. Therefore, different failing readers will exhibit different patterns of strengths and weaknesses thus requiring differently constructed intervention strategies for different students suffering from dyslexia.
Various health organizations have conducted different types of research with the aim of diagnosing and thus intervening appropriately. One such research was conducted by the National Institutes of Health with the aim of evaluating the effects of an intensive and individualized reading intervention for second-grade students who had previously experienced inadequate response after being subjected to certain intervention regimens from the previous year. Preliminary results showed that the students that had received the research intervention had significantly better improvement than those that had received the typical school instruction. The areas of focus included word identification, phonemic decoding, and word reading fluency.
The study was done to satisfy the need for empirical evaluations of supplemental early reading interventions that allow for individualization to meet the needs of students with reading difficulties. The research involved ten elementary schools located in the southwestern United States. Four of the schools were located in a small city, with characteristics indicating they belonged to lower socioeconomic status than the other six which were located in a large urban school district. The study had seventy-two students participating in it at this particular stage while the first study that carried out the diagnostic tests had six hundred and eighty students. Students received the intervention on an average of 102.1 days provided with daily intervention in 45-min sessions. The overall result supported their hypothesis that the students who had received the intervention would significantly outperform the students who had received the typical school instruction; the intervention was associated with significantly greater gains than typical instruction (Denton et al., 2013). This research was, however, limited by the relatively small number of participants. The racial composition also was also imbalanced with a lot of Hispanics and African Americans in comparison to whites.
A separate research was conducted to evaluate the long-term educational impact of these interventions. This is because most of the conventional studies only follow-up up to two years after the obtaining data supporting the benefits of early reading interventions. This study, therefore, evaluated reading outcomes more than a decade after a long reading intervention period had been done. The participants in the original study attended eleven schools in four school districts in upstate New York, covering poor, urban and middle-class schools thus evenly distributed. This initial study had sixty-nine participants, again a very small number. The study conducted a series of analyses that used original group assignment as the main independent variable. The major finding was that the treatment group demonstrated a moderate to small effect size advantage on reading and spelling measures over the comparison group more than a decade after a reading intervention that took place when the students were in Grades 2 or 3. The results thus supported the hypothesis that those that had undergone the eight-month reading intervention would perform better than the students who had not undergone the same. Even though the margins were not significant thus showing that the evaluation of long-term performance after such a long period could not be decisively made (Blachman et al. 2014).
References
Blachman, B., Schatschneider, C., Fletcher, J., Murray, M., Munger, K., & Vaughn, M. (2014). Intensive reading remediation in grade 2 or 3: Are there effects a decade later? Journal of Educational Psychology , 106 (1), 46-57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033663
Denton, C., Tolar, T., Fletcher, J., Barth, A., Vaughn, S., & Francis, D. (2013). Effects of tier 3 intervention for students with persistent reading difficulties and characteristics of inadequate responders. Journal of Educational Psychology , 105 (3), 633-648. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0032581
