#81, Research Paper: ‘Reading Disability – A specific blockage in Language Learning: An Overview of the problem and Suggestions for the Follow-up studies’ by Vaishali Shivkumar

“A learning disability refers to retardation, disorder, or delayed development in one or more of the processes of speech, language, reading, writing, arithmetic, or other school subject resulting from a psychological handicap caused by a possible cerebral dysfunction and / or behavioral disturbances. It is not the result of mental retardation, sensory deprivation, or cultural and instructional factors.”

In the 1962 edition of his introductory text on exceptional children, Kirk defined learning disability as above. Five elements in this definition have appeared which helped many of the definitions followed it:

1. Sub-average achievement (reading, writing, arithmetic) or achievement-related behavior (speech or language);
2. intra-individual differences – the possibility that the sub-average achievement or achievement-related behavior occurs in only one or some areas, with average or above-average achievement in the other areas;
3. reference to psychological processing problems as casual factors or at least as co-related factors;
4. suggestion of cerebral dysfunction as a possible casual factor;
5. exclusion of other disabling conditions (e.g., mental retardation) and environmental conditions as casual factors.

The learning disabilities are not very common but they are found commonly in the children who have suffered mal-nutrition in their pre or post natal stage. Mother’s mal-nutrition also works as a problematic factor, here, as fetus gets nourishment from her mother’s blood. The slow or disturbed development of the neurons in the pre or post natal stage also happens to be a major cause behind the learning disabled children. Actually, they are the children with learning difficulties or they are differently able in the matter of learning but the world of neurology and society has given the tag of “Learning Disabilities” to the conditions which are seen in such kids. Specific among Learning Disabilities are conditions like Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia and Dyspraxia. No specific difficulty occurs in isolation. A child with a learning difficulty has a cluster of symptoms that hamper learning.

Reading is a tool skill. We use tool skills as a means of accomplishing other things, for example, we read novels of romance, cartoons about politics, signs advertising products, different books instructing us how to prepare some particular kind of things. In addition to that, we get employment if we know how to read, write, speak and listen appropriately and fluently. Reading with the other three skills is very essential to be successful in life in one or another way. The students who have problems with reading skill may have some other difficulties with it too. By the second standard, such a child is left behind in the skills’ performance in the classroom and recognized by the teacher as a poor student in studies. Sometimes, such kids gradually develop a kind of trick which helps them to leave behind the reading problems very easily but this task needs confidence and patience on both the parts – student and teacher.

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“Reading is the ability to decode written symbols into spoken sounds.” This statement shows a complex system of deriving meaning from printed material which requires: the skills and knowledge to understand how phonemes, or speech sounds, are connected to print; the ability to decode unfamiliar words; the ability to read fluently; adequate background information and vocabulary to foster reading comprehension; the advance of appropriate active strategies to construct meaning from print; the progress and maintenance of a motivation to read. Gough and Tunmer give a simple formula for this whole process of reading: R = D * C. (R stands for reading skill; D for decoding and C for comprehension).

This students have problems which are simply can be called Reversals (for example, saw for was) of all kinds, even in numerical matters and words. These students have problems with phonology (like segmenting and blending the phonemes and sounds); problems with decoding the letters and words’ printed anywhere; they also have the problems with fluency and naturally with comprehension since comprehension is one of the biggest problems for reading disabled students to mend up. The other problems are of syntax, semantics (meaning of language), etc. Thus, the most important reading or learning disabilities come into the focus are: developmental dyslexia (reading disability) and non-verbal learning disability.

A teacher has to put the student in the assessment process to finalize her doubts about the reading disability the student has. The screening and eligibility assessments use comprehensive measures of reading performance. These kinds of tests or assessments provide the teacher with the detailed result about the student’s awareness, weakness, strength and stage of development in other areas of language study. Once the students are identified with the reading difficulties, the teachers start preparing special remedial classes for such needy students. Many more treatments are applied to the student to improve the level of her/his ability in reading problems. This kind of identification of the problem is called diagnosis and after that when the improvement is checked very often, this is called progress monitoring which helps the teacher to understand if her special educational plan is working with the student or not as in such cases, a teacher has to make different educational plans for different reading disabled students. This happens to be one of the very tough tasks because not a single child having reading disability has the same symptoms; even if many of the symptoms are common but many more are more complex and unusual in dissimilar cases.

In such cases, a system which is called screening can be developed by some school system to develop explicit practices for assessing student’s reading competence and then examining closely those whose reading skills fall below a certain level. To identify such students, schools use screening tests which are often general achievement batteries. Some specific among these tests are devoted to diagnosing reading problems, probably are the instruments most commonly used to identify students with reading disabilities. Even then, a teacher can contact a special education person to get the perfect result of this kind of assessment. The more strong matter is that teachers probably do not base their evaluations on reading performance alone as it can be a false leads but it is one of the important clues in identifying the problems.

Diagnostic Testing is one of the many ways to start the process of analyzing and diagnosing the child’s problems. When this stage comes, many teachers use different kinds of tests to identify some more specific deficits. These tests provide more clear result than the screening tests in the reading performances since they can include the subtests like letter recognition, word recognition, reading rate, and comprehension. This helps a teacher to understand the problems in the particular areas of learning reading. For example, Roswell-Chall Diagnostic Test of Word Analysis Skills is designed to understand the young children’s level in reading, specifically encoding and decoding process in them.

An Informal Reading Inventory is a series of reading passages of word lists graded in order of difficulty. A student reads from the series of lists or passages, beginning with one the teacher thinks is likely to be easy for her particularly. The student continuously makes progress and increasingly tries to understand the difficult passages or word lists on her own. As a student reads, a teacher monitors performance and the kinds of errors being made by the student like omitted words, mispronunciation or hesitation. A teacher can also ask questions if the Informal Reading Inventory is made of passages and note down, for later records, the errors in the student’s answers.

Clinical Teaching is another such option which helps the Informal Reading Inventories the most.  In such tests, a student is provided with a small lesson and checked whether they succeed or not. It needs a lot of careful effort as a teacher has to give an appropriate sequence of lessons so each successive lesson is more difficult than the last and easier than the next. If a student has problems dealing with one particular lesson, a teacher knows where the inundated point for the student is and she can focus on that point afterwards in her instructions. This kind of testing needs a lot of care and planning, too. In the matter of comprehension, clinical teaching should focus on the extent to which students remember information from what they have read; comprehension can be assessed clinically by having students verbally retell the content of a passage they have just read.

Reading Remediation is one of the treatments which support a lot when a teacher tries to put up with such students. Reading Remediation includes several reading and achievement tests like WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children); WRAT (Wide-Range Achievement Test – an oral word-recognition test); The Gray Oral Reading Test (an oral paragraph-reading test); Stanford Achievement Test (a silent reading test); The Daniels and Diack Test (a reading test with phonetic content only) and Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Ability. Reading Remediation helps the students to tackle almost all the problems regarding the reading skill.

Perpetual Training (Perpetual Motor Training) is another such help for the teacher to shape the student’s mind and behavior to cope up with studies easily. The impetus for altering perceptual function – visual, auditory, or tactile – rests on the assumption that proper sensory perception, intersensory integration, sensory-motor organization, and perceptual or perceptual-motor competence are the necessary foundations for the development of reading.  Furthermore, it is assumed that improvement in these functions automatically leads to increased reading ability.

Enhancement of Attention: Effects of Stimulant Medication is one of the strong crucial treatments as attention has been claimed to be critical to the development of reading, and children with reading disorders are said by some to suffer from dysfunctional attentional processes. This view has linked reading disorders to other childhood conditions also purported to be due to poor attention, leading to the overall diagnostic rubric of “minimal brain dysfunction” or learning disabilities. Stimulant treatment can vary, not only in time, but also in dosage.

Enhancement of Motivation: Effects of Reinforcement is related to motivation. The importance of motivation for the development of reading skills has been emphasized by many writers who view task interest as a factor affecting reading proficiency. The development of reading is conceptualized as following the traditional stimulus-response paradigm. If the response is not reinforced, it will be extinguished. In this model, cognitive development and motivational systems follow learning principles, and traditional behavioral principles are applicable to language development. Following an S-R model, printed words elicit verbal responses. If appropriate responses are reinforced, they are acquired and reading occurs; if not, they drop out of a child’s repertoire.

In fact, the reading difficulties do not come alone but they come with other specific problems like problems in oral expression (saying what you mean accurately); problems regarding listening comprehension (understanding what you hear); written expression (writing what you mean accurately); basic reading skills (reading words accurately and efficiently, whether or not you understand them); reading comprehension (understanding what you read); math calculation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – computing with the numbers); math reasoning (the more complicated parts of math, such as word problems and algebra). As we have talked above, solutions are there but they are always open for the improvement as each and every child has different kind of wants and needs from the field of special education. Technology can be more helpful as that is the only way out to get the student interested in the study as well as in the understanding what she is studying.

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