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Thursday stream 5 Session 09.00 - 11.10 Length 25 minutes
Ginny Stacey
Support Tutor for Dyslexic Students, Oxford Brookes University gstacey@brookes.ac.uk
Abstract
Dyslexic people continue to have reading problems once they have gained some proficiency with phonics, single word recognition and comprehension. There are different reading techniques, such as scanning or skim reading, which would be useful. Then one needs to be able to read for a variety of purposes and match the reading technique to the purpose. One needs to be able to recognise keywords and ideas, and to organise the new material, either on paper or in memory, in a way that facilitates easy access. Reading remains a barrier or hard work whether for study, everyday living or pleasure. This paper will look at techniques that can be used by dyslexic people to make it easier to gain information from the written word; the use of right brain thinking to assist understanding and note taking will be considered; it will be argued that understanding syntax can assist reading complex text. Photo Reading will also be discussed as an example of using a very different method for accessing meaning from words. Much of the heavy work experienced by dyslexic adults can be removed from reading and it is well worth knowing how.
Introduction: Dyslexia and the need to learn differently Dyslexic children are usually first identified because they are having difficulty with spelling and/or reading. They can learn the necessary skills when they are taught to read in dyslexic friendly ways: multi-sensory, systematically, with emphasis on phonological processing. The early stages of acquiring literacy skills are well documented and researched and there are many programmes for teaching and learning. The emphasis is usually on the adaptations needed to make learning possible; the expectation is that the skills can be learnt.
Spelling and single word reading are only the beginning skills of using written language. The next stages of literacy are comprehension and fluency of written expression. As dyslexic children master the initial stages, problems at the next stage become visible. Some children have computers, including laptops, to help them. Fortunate children encounter teachers or other adults who can help them with these new skills. Much of the time the personal help is in the form of doing the work for the child. Sometimes the help teaches the skills in dyslexic friendly ways so that the child can use them for him/herself.
By the time most dyslexic people get to university, the basic skills are in place, even if they remain unreliable and vulnerable. Many students have also learnt strategies for coping with the other tasks that came their way at school and home. Mature students often have a wide experience of success in jobs that don't depend on their doing a lot of reading. Usually they report that essay writing was always a problem. Some can read novels with enjoyment and some will still avoid picking up a book. Most agree they have difficulty staying awake while reading.
Whatever the achieved competence a student brings to university or college, the amount of reading required can only be done with a new level of skills that are adequate to the expected pace of learning at higher education. As with the very basic skills, these need to be learnt in dyslexic friendly ways, if dyslexic students are to become independent people who can manage their dyslexia and produce work that matches their potential.
This paper discusses approaches to advanced reading that can make a considerable difference to the efficiency of dyslexic students' reading: preparation for reading, some tools for advanced reading, and a different way of reading: PhotoReading. It also includes a way of working with dyslexic students so that they can gain the skills for themselves.
Preparation: Mind Set
Mind set (Russell, 1979) is a process through which the mind is energised to be receptive specifically to the new information that a student is going to study. By deliberately re-activating ideas and experience already lodged in the mind, thinking relevant to the new information is in place as the period of study starts. This thinking is able to process the information properly and to make appropriate links to whatever is already know by that mind. At the end of the process, the mind is set ready to work on the subject about to be studied and comprehension is available as the work starts.
Without mind set a dyslexic student is likely to work very hard to decipher the words but comprehension is lacking. Students can find that their eyes have effectively moved over the page and the information on the page has not entered the brain in a systematic way that can be re-called at a later date. Students can find they have to re-read sections many times before the sense starts to grow. Some students feel they understand parts but that they cannot hold on to the big picture.
Mind set can be applied before lectures, before a period of reading or internet work and many other situations not just those related to study. Used on a regular basis, it can be an initial stage of revision for exams and it can reduce the labour of revision.
The process of mind set need only take a couple of minutes. Any way of thinking and recalling ideas will work. Mind maps are useful, but so are flow charts, diagrams, pictures, a meditative style recapture of a field trip. 'Teaching for the Two-Sided Mind' (Williams, 1986) and 'Approaches to Supporting Dyslexic Students' (Stacey, in print) have many alternative techniques for learning and any of these can be used for mind set. A series of questions are productive too: What do I know? What was the last lecture about? What can I remember from the last chapter? What am I interested in? Even "How can I be interested in this subject?", will produce thinking about the subject that is then available to process the new information efficiently. For subjects that have a lot of jargon words, mind set can be achieved by recalling the meaning of the words, their spelling and pronunciation.
The aim of mind set is to stimulate coherent thoughts about the subject to be studied so that the new information will be processed usefully by the mind. Reading that follows mind set has a great deal of the hard work taken out of it.
Tools For Orthodox Advanced Reading
Keywords
A prevalent instinct of dyslexic students is to write down every word in lectures or from a book because they are so afraid of leaving out the wrong ones. Difficulties in note taking are magnified as a result of this instinct. The ability to recognise the keywords of an idea would lead to more efficient note taking. In teaching dyslexic students about keywords, I have found various other skills come to the surface.
Since many dyslexic students learn by experience or by seeing, I use the passage about keywords from The Brain Book (Russell, 1979). The passage is less than a page long; it has three paragraphs; it contains an explanation, an example, some characteristics and research. The students have copies and there's an overhead.
First, I read the passage aloud and we discuss their reactions. The passage is not difficult. Most of the students report they have the feeling that all the words are necessary. We then go through sentence by sentence and decide which words are necessary for capturing the concept of keywords. The words selected are underlined on the overhead. By the time the whole passage is checked, not many words have been selected as keywords and some have been rejected as repeats from earlier in the passage. The power of keywords is made real for the students because they have taken part in the decisions and the result is visible in front of them.
Meta-ideas
At the same time as looking for the keywords, the students often discuss why the words are included or excluded. I provoke the discussion if it doesn't happen. It brings to the fore the meta-ideas level of processing information.
The students decide which parts of the passage are giving them information that will be useful, which are helping with initial understanding and therefore won't need to be remembered or noted. They are thinking about their own purposes in approaching the concept and how those could change with circumstances. Students doing psychology or education might have to write an essay explaining or justifying the concept in an academic way; such students would need to remember the research evidence. Those simply wanting to practise and use the concept of keywords will need fewer of the keywords in the passage.
Again, the overhead is used. The passage is annotated with the appropriate meta-ideas. At the end, one can see that each part has a reason to be there: definition, uses, example, explanation of the example, research, results…. Reading or listening that is looking for the meta-ideas keeps a student engaged in the reading process much more effectively than un-informed reading.
When applying meta-ideas to their own subjects, students may need to identify the pattern that occurs in their own subjects. Different disciplines have different sets. Once found, the meta-ideas produce a framework for any subject which can be used from the initial acquisition of knowledge to the final output, be that exams, essays, dissertations or reports at work.
Awareness of Purpose
As discussed above, the awareness of purpose enabled the students to see that more or less of the paragraphs were useful and would be needed in notes depending on the purpose of the reader. In this case, the majority of students would only need to record a limited amount of the passage. Awareness of purpose can often restrict the level to which a passage or section is necessary to a student. It is very disheartening to put long hours into reading only to find that there was no benefit at the end. Being very conscious of the usefulness of material goes some way to prevent this waste of time. Having an essay plan in mind while reading can be effective in keeping the reading purposeful.
Syntax
The first sentence of the passage on keywords is two and a half lines long and contains a list of four characteristics of keywords, each involving several words; it has 14 words between one verb and its subject. It is quite hard to understand. One encounters such writing frequently. When the context is already known, the mind can sort out the meaning of such sentences, providing enough words can be stored in the short-term memory. People with good verbal short-term memories can store a lot of words, so their minds will subliminally work out the meaning of sentences like the first one in the keyword passage. Few dyslexic students have a short-term memory that can help; they need to learn how to use syntax for reading sentences like this one. Again they need to find a way that suits them individually. I have found the approach and level of material in 'Grammar Made Easy' works well with students.
PhotoReading
PhotoReading is quite a different method of access to the printed word. It centres round being able to mentally 'photograph' pages of a book or article and then activating the information that has entered the mind. It uses several processes that I have found useful or have observed at work in my mind before, so it didn't feel too strange.
There is a very systematic preparation to the process. During this part, one is using mind set, as above, and altered states of consciousness. The PhotoReading is done straight after the preparation. You learn to work with a whole field of view and not just the few words in the centre of focus. During the PhotoReading, you slightly defocus the eyes and you use a repeated word phrase to stop the language centres from working. You view each opening of the book as a whole without moving the eyes, and you turn the pages over every few seconds. Having done that, you wait for anything between 20 minutes and 24 hours to let your mind work subliminally on the material. Then you bring back the information to the conscious mind by moving fast through the book and using it as a trigger for recall. The final process is a very rapid read, but this isn't often necessary.
The initial stage including the PhotoReading usually takes 20 - 30 minutes. The hardest part (for a dyslexic with organisational hassles) can be timetabling the break. The later stage varies in length depending on the use one has for the material.
I have used this method myself on various occasions. I've taught it to a very intelligent man who has very poor phonological skills, and to groups of undergraduates. I haven't used it in a researched way.
My own use of this technique has been such a relief. For example, I needed to use a book of 218 pages on psychometrics for a particular purpose. Normally it would take a long time to read such a book. With PhotoReading , I had got everything I needed for the job in hand and I had planned the complex proposal within one and half hours.
Watching the man with the poor phonological skills using PhotoReading was delightful. At the stage after the break when one uses the article or book to activate, he was running his fingers down the columns and telling me what the different sections were about. By comparison with his usual struggles, this processing was extraordinary.
It is difficult to follow up the undergraduates because they come to groups to learn the process and then go off to use it. I don't have time to follow up their progress. During the learning process, I know that the preparation stage is teaching them much better strategies for reading. With the framework they acquire, their reading will improve even if PhotoReading itself isn't a skill they gain. Some experience difficulty in maintaining the focus that is needed, but others seem to be able to use the process as easily as I can. The process makes use of the de-focusing effect which, for some dyslexics, interferes with the standard method of reading. It's quite a relief when a disadvantage suddenly becomes useful.
One would like to do controlled research when introducing a new technique such as PhotoReading, but the benefits of the initial systematic work can be used by all and, with even this much progress, one of the major sources of work overload for dyslexic students is reduced.
Conclusion: Tools for Reading
Reading remains a problem for dyslexic people at university level. There are advanced skills needed for university reading. They will have to be learnt in dyslexic friendly ways, just as dyslexic children were given special programmes at the start of their struggles with literacy.
Once the skills have been learnt, one has to monitor one's alertness and notice signs that one has slipped back into inefficient processing. I have learnt to recognise going to sleep over work as a indication that dyslexia has probably kicked in again and that I'd better switch my thinking to something more effective.
The deliberate use of advanced reading skills bring an enormous sense of achievement to dyslexic students. It allows them the opportunity to tackle a major source of overwork with an expectation of efficiency and success.
References:
Dykes, Barbara (1992) 'Grammar Made Easy', Sydney: Hale & Iremonger
Russell, Peter (1979) 'The Brain Book', London: Routledge
Scheele, Paul (1997) 'PhotoReading', Wayzata, Minnesota: Learning Strategies Corporation
Stacey G., (in print) Approaches to Supporting Dyslexic Students in Perspectives from United States, Canada, Great Britain and Israel Conference Proceedings
Williams, Linda V. (1986) 'Teaching for the Two-Sided Mind', New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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