How the Special Needs Brain Learns

How the Special Needs Brain Learns  by David A. Sousa
Chapter 5 Reading Disabilities

This book chapter gives a clear overview of reading disabilities.  The author starts by explaining that reading is, by its very nature, a difficult task for which we do not have any "coded" genes.  That is, reading is not hard-wired into our brains like spoken language, and must be taught.

Reading is certainly related to speaking, and difficulty with speaking is often a precursor to reading difficulties, but reading involves much more.  It involves phonological awareness (the understanding that oral language can be divided into smaller components), and phonemic awareness (the ability to understand and manipulate the sounds in words).   It involves understanding the alphabaic principle (the association of sounds with written symbols) and the complex rules for spelling English.  It also involves complex systems for making meaning out of text.

The author explains how reading involves three neural networks:  visual processing, auditory processing, and the executive function to put these together for comprehension.

He goes on to outline common causes for reading disabilities.  There may be social and cultural causes related to differences in a child's home language environment as compared to the language of school.  There may be linguistic causes such as phonological deficits; a lag between visual processing ("seeing" a letter) and auditory processing ("hearing" the sound); deficits in working memory; structural differences in the brain; lesions in parts of the brain used to decode text; and genetic mutations in certain areas of the brain.  There are also causes related to visual and auditory processing independent of linguistic systems.  This would include difficulties in hearing sequential sounds in words, and difficulties separating letters in a word.

The author summarizes findings in brain-imaging related to reading.  In general, the areas of the brain that are active during reading are different in children with dyslexia from those in fluent readers.   Fluent readers use the back of the brain; struggling readers use - with more effort - the front of the brain.

The author discusses ways of identifying students who may have reading disabilities, and then outlines good remedial programs, most of which involve highly structured, intensive programs that focus on building phonemic awareness.  There is evidence that good remedial programming can actually alter the brain function to a more efficient state.

The author concludes by drawing up a list of strategies that should be used by all teachers when working with children with reading disabilities.

THOUGHTS

Having worked with children with reading disabilities, the material in this article was quite familiar to me.  However, the author did a good job of summarizing the latest research in the field, and, as always, it was a good reminder for me to always be very aware of how my different learners experience reading.  Just as I am totally confused when someone shows me how to fix an engine, many children have that same sense of confusion when someone is showing them how to read.