Painting a New Picture of Learning to Read

An Interview with Assistant Professor Tami Katzi [caption id="attachment_8932" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Assistant Professor Tami Katzir (Karlyn Morissette photo)"] [/caption] The research of Assistant Professor Tami Katzir centers on reading development and reading breakdown. Her interests revolve around three connected areas: the first represents an effort to link different developmental perspectives on the breakdown of written language. The second attempts to connect converging lines of research from brain-imaging studies of reading to comparisons of cognitive profiles of children with reading disabilities in different languages. She is also committed to research that directly bridges the theoretical and the applied: for example, the application of brain-based theories of dyslexia in the design of intervention for reading-impaired children. Taken together, this work incorporates a multi-dimensional approach to the investigation of the underlying causes and manifestations of dyslexia and to its prediction and intervention. Q: How can dyslexia be identified? A: Possible indicators of dyslexia in early childhood include:

• Late development of spoken language
• Slow reading of letter names, and
• Difficulties in sounding out words.

Among adolescents with dyslexia, characteristics include:

• Slow and inaccurate reading of words
• Poor reading comprehension, and
• Spelling difficulties, such as reversed letter order, deletion of letters, and misrepresentation of the sounds in a word.

Most dyslexics have more difficulty expressing themselves in written language than when they speak—spelling problems usually slow the transformation of their thoughts to writing. Some adolescent dyslexics may continue to have difficulty associating the correct sound to a letter. However, most adolescents with dyslexia have only minor decoding problems with simple and regularly spelled words. Instead, their main issue is slow, dysfluent reading, which prolongs the time needed to comprehend the material.

“The web view allows for a broader, multidimensional view of reading in which there are multiple possible sources of reading disabilities and different subtypes of children with different reading profiles.”

Adolescent dyslexics readers, like average achieving students, become more accurate with time, yet they do not become automatic. The failure to either recognize or to measure the lack of automaticity in reading is perhaps the most common error in the diagnosis of dyslexia in accomplished young adults. For bright young adults, a questionnaire regarding the history of their development of language and reading may be helpful in identifying dyslexia. A combination of tests including reading, spelling, language, and cognitive abilities represents a core diagnostic battery. A comprehensive diagnosis should include neurological, psychological, and educational assessments. No diagnosis of dyslexia can ever be based on a single test. Q: Some experts view the process of learning to read as a ladder with steps a child must reach in order to develop reading ability; others view it as a multi-component web-based process. What are the differences in these views? A: Traditional research of reading and reading disabilities viewed reading as a ladder with distinct, narrow steps through which a child must progress. The limitation of this view is that it mainly addressed one cognitive process in reading: phonological processing. Consequently, research has focused on a phonological core deficit as central explanation of reading disabilities, and intervention for children with reading disabilities mainly addressed phonological processing. Recently, several researchers have begun to explain reading development within a multi-component, connectionist model. This family of models suggests that reading cannot be captured by one cognitive process; rather, the investigation of reading should address multiple processes, involving phonology, orthography, and semantics. This web view allows for a broader, multidimensional view of reading in which there are multiple possible sources of reading disabilities and different subtypes of children with different reading profiles. Q: Can you explain the reading processes of phonological processing and rapid letter-naming? How will the children who have difficulties performing either—or both—of these distinct tasks experience different challenges as they learn to read? A: Dyslexia is best described as a heterogeneous group of disorders, with several underlying explanations for distinct subtypes of reading-disabled students. For the past two decades, it had been well-established that dyslexic children have difficulty developing an awareness that words, both written and spoken, can be broken down into smaller units of sounds. They have difficulties with tasks that require the ability to segment the speech stream into minimal sound units, or phonemes.

“No diagnosis of dyslexia can ever be based on a single test.”

Children who have difficulties with these tasks are at risk for having problems learning the alphabetic principle, which involves knowledge of letter-sound rules. They usually will have difficulty accurately reading single words. Recent cutting-edge research in the cognitive neurosciences suggests that, in addition to phonological processing deficits, many severely impaired readers have naming-speed deficits—that is, impaired readers are slow to retrieve the names of very familiar letters and numbers. A naming-speed deficit reflects difficulty in the processes underlying the rapid recognition and retrieval of visually presented letters. What this means for reading is not fully understood. The same factors that slow retrieval processes may also impede the development of rapid letter pattern recognition, which, in turn, may slow down word identification. Children with both types of difficulties will run the highest risk for encountering difficulties learning to read. Q: What does your research mean for the phonics-based reading programs that the No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes? A: My research on fluency suggests that in addition to the need to address phonological processing, we should also work on automaticity in lower-level subskills. Most of the research in the field was influenced by psycholinguistic theory, which emphasized the importance of mapping spoken words onto print. Consequently, a long history of systematic research on phonological deficits supported the notion that the primary source of dyslexics' difficulties lies in accuracy in word reading, which had crucial implications for practitioners and clinicians. For example, assessment and intervention efforts in the field focused largely on phonological processing in reading and routinely neglected to assess other reading-related measures (e.g., reading rate, vocabulary development, and orthographic processing). These findings supported interventions that specifically targeted these issues. Although significant improvements have been shown with these methods, specifically in word-reading accuracy, reading fluency and comprehension are still very difficult to achieve. The shift towards interventions that address automaticity and accuracy as well as the other important components of reading fluency, such as orthography, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax, will enhance and supplement the phonic-based reading intervention programs.