BUS 40 – 2/2000
Due to the “inability or reduced ability to learn to read and write at the level expected for their age”, many pupils are deprived of a school leaving certificate which they could easily achieve due to their otherwise good and in some cases even far above-average intellectual abilities. The Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs has revised the regulations for dealing with dyslexia and partial learning disorders in Bavarian schools (see Official Gazette Dec. 1999). This further expands the key role of teachers in diagnosing and dealing with pupils with reading and spelling difficulties. The appeal to take account of the particular difficulties that these children face is intended to help prevent the pupils concerned from being undervalued. The provision of targeted support measures is intended to alleviate or remedy reading and spelling difficulties in order to pave the way for an appropriate school and career path.
As correctly characterised in the state government’s guidelines, what is subsumed under the term dyslexia is a biologically determined disorder with different manifestations that can be based on very different causes. The importance of cause-related support measures can be illustrated by two simple examples from therapeutic practice. For example, in a large number of children whose reading performance lags far behind that of their classmates, a completely incorrect gaze strategy with inappropriately short fixation phases is observed. These are resting phases of the eyes during which several letters (word segments or words) are read simultaneously. These children give the impression that they are simply not looking properly at what is written in the text. Endings or whole words are omitted, read words are distorted, often the children seem to fantasise about what could be in the text. If you only practise reading with these children without correcting the inadequate fixation phases, no decisive improvement can be achieved and the too short fixation phases can continue to become entrenched. However, if the gaze strategy was corrected in the children treated by the author who suffered from this type of reading disorder, the error rates were drastically reduced within a few weeks. The same applies to reading disorders in which word segments are fixated for a long time, but an attempt is made to recognise more letters simultaneously within a fixation phase than is possible for the reader concerned. In this case, it is important to teach the pupil a reading strategy in which only as many letters are recognised within a fixation phase as the pupil’s ability allows. Here, too, it would not lead to the goal of simply practising reading without considering the cause of the disorder.
In most cases, it is not a single cause that has led to the reading disorder. Several causes overlap and influence each other. Nevertheless, cause-related reading therapies have so far only been carried out in exceptional cases. Cause-related support was not feasible simply because the investigation of reading disorders generally did not include adequate research into the causes, as this is technically complex and usually reserved for university research institutions. Today’s knowledge of the biological processes involved in reading and their disorders enables us to develop computer-aided procedures that allow the causes of reading disorders to be narrowed down quickly and yet with sufficient accuracy for practical use. In addition, programmes for the therapy of reading disorders can be designed that target the causes of the reading disorder. Such developments should take place in close co-operation with teachers, who are largely responsible for implementing scientific findings on the diagnosis and treatment of reading disorders.
At the Institute of Social Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, we have developed computer-aided procedures based on many years of experience in the diagnosis and treatment of reading disorders, which make it possible to identify the causes of reading disorders that cannot be detected in the known reading tests and which allow cause-related therapy. We have used these methods in clinical practice for several years and can now make them available to teachers. We would like to ask teachers from primary schools to take part in trialling computer-assisted diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and to contribute their experience and advice to the further development.
If you are interested, please contact celeco at
info@celeco.de or call: +49 +89 +82006916
Prof. Dr Dr Reinhard Werth