Reading Disabilities: Is It Just About Phonological Awareness?

We are over-focused on reading disabilities being caused by phonological awareness difficulties.  True, this is a huge aspect of reading, and critical for children.  I do not question the value of this knowledge and the importance of phonological awareness training.  I also do not question how important it is to teach phonics (sound/symbol associations) to all children, especially children with reading disabilities such as Dyslexia.

Here is the problem I would like you to consider.  Not all reading problems are directly related to phonological weaknesses.    There are a significant number of children that struggle with reading due to Symbol Recognition problems.  This term is used by Barbara Young in her Arrowsmith Program.  Symbol recognition relates to the ability to hold language symbols (letters, letter patterns) in the brain and to sequence them quickly.  For children with this weakness they struggle to look at a word, and remember what they just read even within seconds of seeing it previously in another sentence.  Researchers often use the term Visual Dyslexics to describe this type of reading failure.  When a child with this Symbol Recognition problem tries to spell, they use phonetic spelling most frequently.  They might spell the word “people” as “peple”, or spell the word “done” as “dun”.  Their brain struggles to retrieve the visual memory for words.  Reading is often very slow and laborious as their brain tries to identify the letter patterns and associate them to a sound.

Children may also struggle with reading due to slow reading speed.  That is, they can decode words and understand what they are reading, but it takes them forever to get through one page.  This often results in a child that doesn’t want to read.  Of course, this is a huge problem, as they avoid reading in school resulting in lower grades as they do not have as much exposure to content.  Educators do not focus on this problem enough – in fact, this may be the primary reason for school underachievement in many adolescences at the high school level – along with comprehension problems.  Again, we can improve reading speed through cognitive remediation.

Comprehension is another area of reading that is overlooked in terms of remediation at the elementary and high school level.  Asking a child to read a textbook and comprehend what the author(s) are trying to communicate is not an easy task.  It requires the sequencing and comprehension of numerous concepts being introduced to the reader.  In one paragraph there may be six concepts being interrelated to each other, and associated with other paragraphs previously read by the student.  If a child has trouble understanding concepts, and comparing concepts with other concepts, reading failure will be automatic.  These students often require tutors for each of their key subject areas.  This is done in order to re-teach the subject material to the child.  Children with this problem often try to utilize memory to get through their classes successfully.  They will study for hours trying to remember facts, dates or answers to questions, but not truly understand what they are learning.  It is sad, really – that this happens to students daily in our schools today.  Can we train the brain to improve conceptual thinking?  In short, yes.

Reading failure can also be a result of a combination, or all, of these neurological weaknesses.  If a child has all of these neurological weakness (i.e., phonological, symbol recognition, visual tracking, conceptual reasoning) than reading failure is even more problematic.  Teachers and parents need to be aware of how complex reading really is.