This week's TES magazine contains an article by Usha Goswami on 'dyslexia'. The article includes a couple of colourful brain scan pictures, one marked 'normal' and the other 'dyslexic'.

I sent the article to Prof. Diane McGuinness because I had serious worries about the accuracy of the content. She kindly agreed to write a critque -see message 2. of this string.

Times Educational Supplement magazine. 17/08/07

The language barrier.

Why do Italians with dyslexia have an inbuilt advantage compared with English children?
Usha Goswami explains

Does dyslexia really exist? Of course. All over the world, it is recognised as a specific learning difficulty intimately linked to the way we process language. Recent scientific research has found that dyslexia reflects atypical development in learning the sound structure of language -its "phonology".

Modern brain imaging helps to show where problems may lie. In skilled readers, brain activity in the left hemisphere's network of spoken language areas increases as they read. In children with developmental dyslexia, this network activity is reduced and there is more activity in right hemisphere networks.

Particularly crucial is an area in the left hemisphere that turns print into sound. It is called the posterior superior temporal cortex. All children with dyslexia find it difficult to count syllables in spoken words, to judge whether spoken words rhyme and to retain speech-based information in short-term memory.

The neural inefficiencies which result in dyslexia are shared across languages, with a similar prevalence of 5 to 7 per cent. Dyslexics in Chinese, French and Italian show similar characteristics. Nevertheless, its manifestation differs according to language. This is because of syllable structure and spelling systems.

Children with dyslexia learning to read languages such as Italian and Greek are best off developmentally. Syllable structure is simple: mostly consonant-vowel pairings, as in mama. There is a consistent, one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. In these languages,dyslexies show slow, effortful but accurate reading and poor spelling.

Children with dyslexia find it more difficult learning to read in languages such as English. The syllable structure is complex. Correspondence between letters and sounds is inconsistent (for instance, "a" makes a different sound in make, man, mark and mall). English dyslexic children show inaccurate reading, slow decoding and poor spelling characteristic of dyslexia in other languages.

Studies in psychology and neuroscience reveal important new information about how the brain builds a language system. Before they produce words, infants learn the basic sounds (called "phonemes"), the order they occur, and how to segment the stream of sound into separate words and syllables. Segmentation depends on speech rhythm and stress (called "prosody").

Babies between one and four days old can distinguish between languages such as Dutch and Japanese using rhythmic cues. This is a basic mammal skill: research has shown that rats and monkeys can also distinguish Dutch from Japanese. Early babbling also reflects rhythmic differences between languages. Adults who are played taped babble from French, Cantonese and Arabic infants can distinguish each "language".

Apes babble too, producing calls with tonal notes, repetition, rhythm and
phrasing. Rhythmic structure is basic to how the mammals' brains process and produce sounds (infants babble syllables, not phonemes).

In humans, the way carers speak to babies is important. This "motherese" (although fathers do it, too) uses higher pitch and increased syllable length for emphasis.

Cognitive neuroscience has shown there are populations of neurons in the brain that oscillate at the syllabic rate of speech. These neurons align their intrinsic rhythmic activity to the start of each spoken syllable. Children with developmental dyslexia find it hard to tell when syllables start. Syllables with abrupt onsets, such as "ba", are more difficult to distinguish from those with extended onsets, such as "wa". This is true in a variety of languages - including French, Hungarian and Finnish. Brain imaging studies also show this.

In languages with consistent spelling, children with dyslexia can use the
written word to sharpen up their phonological system. In English, spelling is less helpful.

Structured teaching of how sound and spelling are linked is the best way to help. In English, this is challenging, because spelling-sound consistencies occur at two levels, rhyme and phoneme. One useful scheme that trains children to make the link at both levels is Sound Linkage.

Usha Goswami is Professor of Education and director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge.

Calling a Spade a Spade
Reading is Not a Biological Property of the Human Brain

In the TES Magazine, Friday, 17th August, Usha Goswami asked a rhetorical question: “Does dyslexia really exist?” and provides this answer:

“All over the world, it is recognized as a specific learning difficulty intimately linked to the way we process language.”

But what does this mean? “Dyslexia” – Greek for “poor reading” means nothing more nor less than it says. If you are a poor reader this could be due to a variety of problems, the most common of which is inadequate instruction.

This statement implies that reading is a biological imperative rather than a human invention that has to be taught. One is no more likely to find “reading neurons” or ‘reading modules’ in the brain than brain cells devoted to deciphering electronic circuit diagrams, algebraic symbols, or musical notation. Inventions are objects or symbol-sets created by the human brain to help us do what we can’t normally do. If we could memorize verbatim everything that was ever said to us, we might not need a writing system. All codes – like those listed above, make it possible to link a biologically based aptitude to abstract symbols that stand for units of that aptitude – like spoken language or music. Codes have to be taught – people do not come equipped with them at birth.

Some codes are easy to learn (the Italian alphabet code is almost entirely transparent – one sound/one symbol) and thus is completely reversible. This means that reading and spelling are instantly connected and reinforce one another. Some codes are hard to learn. The English alphabet code is one of the most opaque writing systems in the world with multiple spellings for almost every sound, and multiple ways to decode the same symbol. The fact that nearly every child in Italy can read, write, and spell after the first term in school, but 30% or more of children in England (or any English speaking country) can scarcely read or spell anything after 4 or 5 years of school, tells us a lot about our writing system and the way it is taught. It tells us nothing about the human brain - unless one wanted to argue that Italians have entirely different brains to English-speaking people.

For these reasons and others, it is puzzling why Goswami prefers to believe that “dyslexia” is real, a property of the brain, and constitutes a primary disorder, rather than that language is a property of the brain and language problems or other problems (visual tracking, visual and verbal memory) may make it difficult for a child to master the symbol-to-sound correspondences of a writing system. Language is a biological imperative. Reading is not. We know a lot about the anatomical locus of language-related brain systems. But you will never find a brain module (or central locus) for translating sets of symbols created by humans to assist learning and memory for specific tasks.

Goswami continues: “Particularly crucial is an area in the left hemisphere that turns print into sound. It is called the posterior superior temporal cortex.”
Having worked in a brain research lab for 10 years, and taught neuropsychology for 20, I know enough to state unequivocally that this statement makes no sense. First, no area of the brain is designated to turn print into sound! Print is a human invention, and linking print to segments of speech is a complex cognitive task that has to be taught. Areas in the brain process what they are biologically (evolutionarily) primed to do. In complex brains, these areas can “gang up” to produce quite sophisticated learning and behaviour. Symbolic thought – for example - is very late in evolution.

To decode a writing system, various regions of the brain combine to make this possible. The frontal eye-fields (part of the frontal lobes) are entrained to scan print from left-to-right, both eyes in focus, and other frontal areas are engaged to keep attention on the task.. The visual system receives this input directly and processes it (or should) as individual letters or multi-letter units (digraphs), and transmits this elsewhere. The auditory system (superior temporal cortex) which has great facility in discriminating phonemes – links this input to its auditory representation. Cross-modal signal processing – largely a function of the parietal lobes (left and right hemisphere), help make this connection, and the left-hemisphere motor systems output subvocal or vocal speech – which it does spontaneously once a word is “decoded.”

A developmental delay or difficulty in any one of these brain systems could create problems learning to read. Thus, children with general language delays, weak auditory or verbal short-term memory, or other perceptual and cognitive deficits could have problems learning to read and spell. But these are language and memory problems, not “reading disorder” problems. These children are few and far between, constituting less than 5% of the population, and this cannot account for the 30-40% poor or non-readers in English-speaking schools.

If we look at the last 20 years of research on speech and language development, we find that there is little correspondence between what speech and hearing scientists, developmental psychologists, linguists, psychophysicists, etc. have learned about language development, and what Goswami identifies in her report as causal links to reading problems. For example, she argues that one reason English children have more difficulty learning to read is because the English “syllable structure is complex,” and that “Children with developmental dyslexia find it hard to tell when syllables start.”

But dyslexia is not a ‘developmental’ disorder (implying a biological basis for reading), nor do children anywhere in the world have difficulty segmenting syllables, a fact that has been repeatedly demonstrated in research over the last 20 years. If Goswami’s thesis was correct, English children would take much longer to learn to talk and understand speech than children in other countries, and we know this isn’t true from scores of cross-cultural studies on how infants hear and process speech. They do not, as she claims, have any more trouble hearing syllable onsets than children learning any other language. If a child couldn’t segment words out of the speech stream, he would never learn to understand or produce speech!

There is large scientific literature on infants’ auditory processing skills which dates back to 1971 with Eimas’ startling discovery that infants from 1 to 4 months old exhibit the same categorical perception for consonant-vowel contrasts (‘ba’-‘da’) as adults. In 1998, Aslin and his colleagues revealed 8 month-old infants’ astonishing skill in analyzing the phoneme cues that help wrench words out of the speech stream. And they can do this even when all rhythmic cues are eliminated.

Scores of developmental studies show that phonemic processing is one of the most “buffered” language skills humans possess, and is least susceptible to disruption and malfunction. Chaney showed that by age three, children are highly sensitive to the phoneme level of speech. Nearly all of the 87 three-year-olds in her study could listen to isolated phonemes (/b/ -- /a/ -- /t/), blend them into a word, and point to a picture representing that word – with nearly 90% scoring well above chance. Of the 22 tasks that she administered, this was the second easiest task. And contrary to Goswami’s assertion, the ability to reproduce rhyming endings or alliteration were the most difficult, with the vast majority of the children failing these tasks.

Despite results like these, Goswami persists in holding to her theory that “rhyme” is as important as phonemes in learning to master an alphabetic writing system. She even claims that rhyme is relevant to our spelling system: “spelling-sound consistencies occur at two levels, rhyme and phoneme.” The notion that the rhyme (word endings that sound alike) is relevant to learning an alphabetic writing system (which is entirely based on phonemes) has been largely discredited. When the National Reading Panel in the US published their landmark survey of reading research in 2000, results showed that rhyme-based teaching methods were singularly ineffective either alone or combined with something else. By contrast, the programmes which were highly successful all shared these features:

Teach the 40+ phonemes in English as the basis for the code (and NO OTHER UNITS), teach children to decode and encode in sequence from left to right (segmenting and blending), introduce letters as soon as possible (don’t teach phoneme awareness independently of print), include lots of copying and writing to link visual, auditory, and motor systems, avoid letter names, and never allow or encourage children to “guess” words on the basis of partial cues or pictures on the page.


Diane McGuinness
Emeritus Professor in Psychology
University of South Florida

Support for the above comments and analysis of the scientific literature is set out in depth in Early Reading Instruction (2004) and Language Development and Learning to Read (2005) MIT Press. These books review a vast literature on these topics dating from the mid 1960s to the 21st century.

I am about to go out and have only time for a quickie.

One statement that immediately struck me in Goswami's article was this:
'In languages with consistent spelling, children with dyslexia can use the written word to sharpen up their phonological system. In English, spelling is less helpful'.

If 'consistent spelling' helps to 'sharpen' children's awareness of phonology, why not just start English-speaking children off on words with only the simplest mappings between spellings and sounds, as in synthetic phonics? This surely puts them on a level playing-field, at leat in the early stages, (and, I would argue, even in the longer term as far as phonemic awareness is concerned), with children learning to read in other languages.

Jenny C.

Further to what I wrote above:

When my grandson was 17 months old, we started teaching him letter-shapes and one sound for each. Within a few months, he could point to the right shape if we said any of the sounds and could say the sound if we pointed to any of the shapes. I started trying him on oral blending about 3 weeks before he turned two - he was mystified at first, but caught on a few days after his birthday. Soon after that they moved to the USA and I didn't see him again until he was 27 months old. His parents had done a bit of blending with him in the meantime, but not much. When I went to visit them, I thought I would try to teach him to segment spoken words into phonemes. In two 10-minute sessions on one day, he learnt first to say the third phoneme if I said the first and second of any 3-sound word (e.g. I would say 'dog is /d/ - /o/ ..???' and he would say /g/) and then to say the second and third phonemes if I just said the first. The next day, I found that if I just said the whole word, he could say all three phonemes. Moreover, he could do this even if I said words such as 'boat', 'sheep' and 'church', regardless of the fact that he had not been taught any isolated digraph sounds - these words were as easy for him to segment as 'cat', 'dog', 'hen' etc. He was even able to segment the word 'Bach', which contained a non-English phoneme. All this at 27 months! It made me think that a little bit of letter-sound teaching and blending practice can go a very long way in promoting phonemic awareness.

Jenny C.

95 % of children who don’t learn to read are “instructional casualties” ( Reid Lyon NICHD ). There are however a small percentage of children, no more than 5 % , whose problems are not primarily caused by poor teaching but have a neurobiological cause. Personally I’ve always liked Mona’s description of these children who have a “potential for muddlement” and most of these children can also learn to read with good initial teaching.

Dr. Richard Olson ( Society For The Scientific Study Of Reading ) claims that the behaviour data that has been collected from twin studies comparing identical and fraternal twins points to a genetic influence of 50 % . Environmental factors including poor instruction account for the other 50% .

In any diagnosis of Dyslexia or Learning Disability “ include consideration of a student’s response to well-designed and well- implemented early intervention as well as remediation programs as part of the identification of LD.” ( Page 279 Rethinking Learning Disabilities- Progressive Policy Institute - Thomas B. Fordham Foundation )

In other words the burden of proof is on the school to show clear evidence that the child received effective research based initial instruction of a suitable intensity and duration provided by a properly trained teacher before a diagnosis for Dyslexia or LD can be made.

Thank you, Professor McGuinness. It is an absolute thrill to encounter depth
of understanding coupled with clarity of expression, especially in a topic flooded with
confusion and controversy.

And thank you Susan, for arranging that public exchange.

I'd like to ask the RRF moderators:

1) Are there any objections to me linking to this thread from other forums?
2) Would it be preferred that I copy and paste instead?
3) Professor McGuinness's response seems composed as a published article,
so would copy and pasting (with credit of course) be permitted?

Best regards, Peter Warner.

Peter,
We are extremely fortunate to have a person with such outstanding intellect combined with great generosity on the RRF committee.

I've put the TES article and D.McG's critique on the Classics forum so you can link to it without the additional comments.

I offered to distribute Diane's article so, yes please, circulate it widely -either use the Classics link www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=2999, or copy and paste with credit -but, obviously, don't copy the TES article for which TES holds copyright. I only posted the Goswami article in full as it hasn't appeared yet in the TES archives, though a brief version appears here: http://www.tes.co.uk/2419159

The following two quotes (both lifted from Hempenstall's collection http://mams.rmit.edu.au/i1n9s3d6xzi5.rtf ) question Goswami's research on rhyme and analogy:

The TES link to the full article has appeared now:

http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2421779

This is a bit behind the times but we thought we’d like to have our two penn’th on Goswami’s piece, which is, it has to be said, very loosely written indeed. There are so many points one could take up and challenge. For example, she says that ’… the way carers speak to babies is important. This “motherese” … uses higher pitch and increased syllable length for emphasis.’ Of course, she‘s quite right that in many societies people do speak to young children using child directed speech (CDS). However, CDS is by no means universal. When studying the Quiché people of central America, Clifton Pye* found that they did not modify their speech in the way that many western caregivers do. Such language practices as CDS may indeed contribute to a child’s speech development but without being essential to it. We need a lot more studies and more evidence before taking on trust the unqualified assertions made by Goswami and others.

However, we wanted to add one or two points to what Diane McGuinness has already cogently argued. One of the fundamental misunderstandings entertained by Goswami is betrayed in her assertion that: < a > ‘makes’ a different sound in ‘make’, ‘man’, ‘mark’ and ‘mall’. As Diane has pointed out repeatedly, letters don’t make sounds: ‘Letter symbols in alphabetic writing systems represent speech sounds. Speech sounds are the basis for the code, and letters are the code. Letters do NOT “have” or “make” sounds. People have sounds’ (Early Reading Instruction, p.13).
After explaining how the structure of the English sound-spelling system works, Diane points out that there is a difference ‘in outcome between teaching the code from letter to sound (visual strategy) versus from sound to letter (phoneme strategy). (Early Reading Instruction, p.65). The outcome of the former strategy is usually a ‘haphazard organization … notable for the total disregard for the sounds of the language.’ (Ibid., p.67) If you teach from sound to print, you always keep the logic of the code straight. When the trajectory is reversed, as soon as the many-to-one and the one-to-many aspects of the code are encountered, the whole system collapses into chaos.

Goswami’s approach is patently graphemic and, with its insistence on the importance of rhyme, has been shown by Diane not to be well founded. However, it has exercised an appeal to teachers all over the English-speaking world, many of whom are seduced by the seeming plausibility of onset and rime. What we need, as Diane points out later in her book, is for ‘better descriptors for the different types of phonics’ (p.129). The present classificatory system ‘is unsatisfactory because it does not identify the critical difference in logic between programs that teach the code backward from print to sound, and those that teach it forward from sound to print (linguistic phonics).’ (p.129) Not only does Goswami not understand the trajectory, she doesn’t understand the way the code works. And neither, in our opinion, do the government experts who have produced Letters and Sounds, its title alone making clear its orientation. Again as Diane has said repeatedly said, we need real evidence rather than personal opinions.

Sounds~Write is straightforwardly and unambiguously ‘linguistic phonic’ in its trajectory. Furthermore, it is structured to include all of the elements Diane holds to be the essential ingredients of a linguistic phonics programme - and then some! The data we have collected over the past four years support her hypotheses in all respects. This data, gathered, we would like to make clear, from very different areas of the country to include different types of state schools in almost always challenging environments, produces results far beyond the expectations of what the teachers teaching the programme had previously thought possible. How can we make this assertion? Because we have the evidence (on over 2,500 children), which incidentally we will again, for the fourth year running, be submitting on the Sounds~Write website as soon as we have collected and analysed all of last year’s data! All our data, including pupils’ original answer sheets, is available for independent academic scrutiny. We find it surprising that many of the various programmes regularly recommended to teachers on this forum, despite having been around for many years, have never produced the evidence to support the claims that they are effective.
* Pye, C., (1986), ‘Quiché Mayan speech to children’, Journal of Child Language, no 13, pp 85-100.

John Walker and David Philpot,
Sounds~Write

Did you mean to sound so pompous and superior, because that's how your posting comes across.

Our school is using one of these "various programmes" and its effectiveness is blindingly obvious.

I thought it was the now-defunct DfES that was instructed by the Parliamentary select skills committee to undertake research on the effectiveness of the various programmes and approaches, which they deliberately failed to even make a start on.

Take it out on them, not writers of "various programmes."

I find this unfriendly tone unwarranted and petty.

The problem is Lesley, this is what Reading Recovery users would say about Reading Recovery. These people must also find us unfriendly and even petty.

I think it is important to collect evidence as we know this will not be done by the DfES.

As an Educational Psychologist, it was not until I read Dianne McGuinnesses texts that I really understood the Science of Reading. Sounds-Write absolutely reflects this.

I don't get the impression that John Walker was taking anything out on the 'writers' of the programmes. I do though detect some level of frustration that the science of reading demonstrated through Sounds-Write does not tend to be aired as regularly as other approaches on this forum.

They don't just say it, they use THEIR DATA to back up their claims. Think about it!

I'm a teacher, using a programme and witnessing our children making huge gains in their reading. I agree that we should be collecting data, other than SATs, QCAs and so on, to show its impact.

We should be having a conversation on here about how best to do that so we can all make comparisons, share findings, discuss merits of the finer points, all in a spirit of working together, using the science/data to inform the way forward.

The only reason I don't discuss Sounds-Write on here is because I've not been trained in it or seen it in action in a school near me, no other reason.

Sounds Write is to be congratulated on all the hard work that has gone into collecting their data, but they don't have a monopoly on people who understand the science of reading.

We're all in this battle together, aren't we?

Diane McGuinness is a remarkable woman and her well-researched and well-explained books have made a huge impact on many people.

But Mona McNee, Sue Lloyd, Ruth Miskin, Rhona Johnston, Joyce Watson, Jenny Chew, Marlynne Grant - and others are also remarkable and very knowledgeable and their contribution to the reading debate is hugely respected by many.

What I worry about, John and Dave, is that you appear to be focused on the expertise of Diane McGuinness and have blotted out, or worse, the contribution made by other people's work and understanding - all of which has contributed significantly to a move in how we teach reading in our classrooms.

What I also wonder, is whether you appreciate that Diane McGuinness herself acknowledges and respects the contribution of other people.

What a pity that you don't appear to model your generosity and appreciation on Diane McGuinness's 'umbrella' approach in the same way that you say you model your programme on her work.

As Lesley says, 'we are all in this together' - and Debbie is saying the same thing in a different way. People such as Joyce Morris, Sue Lloyd and Mona McNee have been demonstrating since the 1970s, in their teaching and/or in the programmes they have devised, that they have understood the 'science of reading' very well. For many others, the eye-opening moment came with the publication of Diane's ‘Why Children Can’t Read’. Those of us who had been beavering away on the right lines long before this warmly welcomed both the book and the number of people who saw the light through it, but have been less happy when it has been suggested that UK understanding of how best to teach reading started only in 1998.

Diane herself did not know about (for example) ‘Jolly Phonics’ when she wrote ‘Why Children Can’t Read’ – once she did get to know about it, she spoke and wrote very positively about it (e.g. in RRF Newsletter 49 in 2002 and in ‘Early Reading Instruction’ in 2004). She also wrote positively about the Johnston and Watson research – that, too, had started before ‘Why Children Can’t Read’ appeared. As Debbie says, it’s a pity when people are less generous and gracious about the contributions of others than Diane herself is. The present time is one in which we all really need to pull together.

John and David write 'Goswami’s approach is patently graphemic' - but Goswami and the rest of the 'Oxford group' actually started in the 1980s very much from a sounds-to-print orientation and continued thinking this way throughout most of the 1990s. Goswami thought that teaching should start from the sounds which children could most easily identify in spoken words – untaught children found onsets and rimes easier to identify than single phonemes, so she thought that was the place to start in the analysis of spoken words. Her idea that phonemes are hard to identify was not too far adrift: even Diane has written that '...alphabets make extreme demands on auditory analysis (ungluing sounds in words)...' (Penguin edition of 'Why Children Can't Read', p. 74). In my view, though, the big mistake made by Goswami was in not thinking carefully enough about the implications for the visual side of things in the teaching of reading - e.g. the implication that the letters ‘at’ should be taught as a unit (cat, bat, hat, fat etc.) before the single letter-shapes were taught. I addressed some of the issues in my ‘Mother knows best’ pamphlet in 1994, wrote privately to Goswami a number of times from 1995 onwards, and also had an article published in 'Journal of Research in Reading' in 1997, with contributions from Sue Lloyd, Irina Tyk and two other very successful phonics teachers. As far as I know, however, it wasn’t until about 1999 that Goswami started emphasising the graphemic side and saying the < a > ‘makes’ a different sound in ‘make’, ‘man’, ‘mark’ and ‘mall’ type of thing. By 2002 she was recognising that learning single letters helped children to understand about phonemes and that this was probably a better place to start than onsets and rimes ('Journal of Experimental Child Psychology', 82). She is still not in favour of synthetic phonics, however.

And on the subject of saying that ‘letters make sounds’: I know that this is inaccurate, but I, personally think it’s a pity to react strongly against it. Plenty of people who have used this kind of language have been extremely successful in teaching children to read and spell, perhaps because they have conveyed in practical ways rather than in their words that what they mean is something more like ‘seeing letters should make us say sounds’.

Jenny C.