Return-Path: <nifl-ld@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id fAG6ID017730; Fri, 16 Nov 2001 01:18:14 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 01:18:14 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20011116001310.025b8410@mail> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-ld@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-ld@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-ld@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: clifwillard <clifwillard@home.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-ld@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-LD:3776] Clif Willard's Letter X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Type: multipart/alternative; X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Status: O Content-Length: 18405 Lines: 300 --=====================_2612068==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Art, I apologize for such a delayed reply. I upgraded my PC and things went down instead of up. I think things are working now. You point out the necessity of those of us who work with people with disabilities to know why they preform in one way or another. As you so aptly pointed out the difficulty these people were having him that the reading were not the result of a lack of phonetic awareness but were the result of emotional traumas. The the difficulty in that was clearly a symptom of the underlying emotional difficulty. Once the emotional basis had been exposed and resolve and remediation and that would certainly proved to be very effective. This would not be the case if the problem was Discalcula. My experience has been met most people with these disabilities experience of emotional stress to specifically to their lack of understanding of the disability itself. For example: every child in the first and second grade believe that every other child is a clone of them. They begin to recognize very early that they are not able to do what most of the other students do and take for granted. They believe that the other students perceive the same way they do. They then begin to ask themselves what is wrong with many? How, they can do it and I can't? They're unable to answer that question but the question is still there. When they read or perform aloud in class and make mistakes the other children being children, 10 to laugh and they begin to feel humiliated among their peers. This then reinforces the there something wrong with them because they cannot perform at the level of their peers. Yet in other situations they experience performing at the same level or in some cases above. This becomes very confusing. They still ask themselves how come they can read and I can't? Sooner or later they come to the conclusion that it is because they just not smart enough to do it. The conclusion is most often is, "I must be stupid." This leads to pour self-image. The problem really is not that they feel stupid and that they don't know but they're afraid they stupid to use their word. Later often they become afraid to find out whether or not they really are. This underlying fear is caused by lack of understanding of the disability not necessarily a dramatic event although feel humiliated among their peers can be quite dramatic. A lot of the behavior of young people with these disabilities is to protect themselves from that kind of humiliation. I applaud your determination and recovery from your receptive language of aphasia. I make a clear distinction however between acquired disabilities which generally result from some brain injury and a genetic form of the disability. The name distinguishing characteristics are that if the disability is genetically based the symptoms tend to be dynamic. Somebody with a reading disability that is genetically based will add sometimes read much better than that most other times. They experience this erratically and is not the result of anything other than timing. If someone has acquired a language disability experience tends through be constant without this dynamic nature of good days vs. bad days sundaes you can read really well and other days you can get your cat. Remediation and relearning can be extremely effective in acquired disabilities. My wife is a physical therapist and has worked for over 30 years in Rehab. Her specialty is head trauma and stroke. We have discussed this many times and a dynamic nature of the symptoms does not occur when someone has in acquired disability. Remediation do is far more effective when the disability has been acquired. The reason that people can do to movie theater and experience a movie in 3D the is because the glasses that you must wear modify the timing in the perception of the information received by the retina. It is to be altering of this timing that the major looks as if it were in 3D. Dr. Talull's research at Rutgers University has also pointed out timing errors. Dr. Margaret Livingston at Harvard also found timing problems. The type of timing and I'm referring to when I say that it is a perceptual disability caused by a timing error in one of the processes I'm referring to this more subtle type of timing problem. I believe that the processes are cyclical and one of the more to among our out of sync with the others. Eventually however unbroken clock will tell the correct time twice a day. So every once in a while all the processes are in sync and the person with the disability seems asymptomatic. A short time later however the symptoms are all back again. When this happens is very confusing for not only the person with the disability but also the person who's trying to help him. You think yourself lovely god inanimate later they can do it and your scratching your head thinking you did it a minute ago. But this experience gives credibility to the individual with the disability but they're just not trying hard enough. Up one of the major problems with our society is that if you have a disability you are presumed to be less competent. This is true regardless of the disability. If to people apply for a job and one person is slightly more qualified and the other hand that person is also on amputated, the job will be given to the other person because the assumption is that you have an amputation you're not as competent as somebody who does not. Incredible as this may be it is directly addressed in the Americans with Disability Act. A person who does not have a disability but is believed to have a disability is covered under the act. I believe that it is essential to understand what is causing a symptom of difficulty in reading, difficulty in writing, difficulty in that, and so on in order to determine what the best intervention might be. There are some who have difficulties in these areas because they have not have an opportunity to learn. There are others who may haven't difficulty due to dramatic emotional experiences. There are others who may haven't difficulty because they did not learn or do not understand how the phonemes are associated the letters of the alphabet. And they are those who have a perceptual deficit disability that is not caused by a learning problem of any kind and therefore cannot be remediated. Many people have said that this may be true in only a few cases did not in the vast majority of cases. I disagree with this and my disagreement is supported by the research. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, August 1997. "OUTCOME IN ADOLESCENCE AND YOUNG ADULTHOOD Well designed follow up studies have repeatedly shown that reading disabilities persist into late adolescence and young adulthood (Maughan, 1995) . Comprehension skills may improve, but the progress of poor readers is often slower than that of their normal reading peers. General intelligence and initial severity of reading disorder are the most consistent predictors of early adult reading levels. Reading comprehension and word recognition skills can continue to improve well into adulthood, but this seems dependent on experience and practice with literacy materials. The most consistent finding across studies, however, is that adults who received the diagnosis of reading disability as children continue to have problems with phonological coding when reading or performing phonemic awareness tasks (Bruck, 1985, 1992, Pennington et al., 1990) These difficulties are particularly evident when spelling (Adelman and Vogel, 1991; Denckla, 1993) and reading nonwords or unfamiliar words (Elbro et al., 1994; Pennington et al., 1987; Scarborough, 1984). In addition, a slower reading rate is typical of adults identified as reading-disabled in childhood (Denckla, 1993; Johnson, 1987). With adequate supports, children with reading problems can make good educational progress, although they take longer to achieve a given level of competence compared with nondisabled controls (Maughan, 1995)." This does support the idea that phonetic awareness is not the major cause of the difficulty in reading. I do think that a major problem is that there are so many different definitions of these disabilities and the label is such a catch all for everything that it becomes difficult to communicate. It might be quite a contribution to the field for this list to develop a definition of terms that is more specific and descriptive in determining appropriate interventions. Personally I feel that a multi-strategic approach leading to the educational success of the individual is most important. Something to think about. Sorry this was so long. Clif --=====================_2612068==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <html> Art,<br><br> I apologize for such a delayed reply. I upgraded my PC and things went down instead of up. I think things are working now. <br><br> You point out the necessity of those of us who work with people with disabilities to know why they preform in one way or another. As you so aptly pointed out the difficulty these people were having him that the reading were not the result of a lack of phonetic awareness but were the result of emotional traumas. The the difficulty in that was clearly a symptom of the underlying emotional difficulty. Once the emotional basis had been exposed and resolve and remediation and that would certainly proved to be very effective. This would not be the case if the problem was Discalcula. My experience has been met most people with these disabilities experience of emotional stress to specifically to their lack of understanding of the disability itself. For example: every child in the first and second grade believe that every other child is a clone of them. They begin to recognize very early that they are not able to do what most of the other students do and take for granted. They believe that the other students perceive the same way they do. They then begin to ask themselves what is wrong with many? How, they can do it and I can't? They're unable to answer that question but the question is still there. When they read or perform aloud in class and make mistakes the other children being children, 10 to laugh and they begin to feel humiliated among their peers. This then reinforces the there something wrong with them because they cannot perform at the level of their peers. Yet in other situations they experience performing at the same level or in some cases above. This becomes very confusing. They still ask themselves how come they can read and I can't? Sooner or later they come to the conclusion that it is because they just not smart enough to do it. The conclusion is most often is, "I must be stupid." This leads to pour self-image. The problem really is not that they feel stupid and that they don't know but they're afraid they stupid to use their word. Later often they become afraid to find out whether or not they really are. This underlying fear is caused by lack of understanding of the disability not necessarily a dramatic event although feel humiliated among their peers can be quite dramatic. A lot of the behavior of young people with these disabilities is to protect themselves from that kind of humiliation.<br><br> I applaud your determination and recovery from your receptive language of aphasia. I make a clear distinction however between acquired disabilities which generally result from some brain injury and a genetic form of the disability. The name distinguishing characteristics are that if the disability is genetically based the symptoms tend to be dynamic. Somebody with a reading disability that is genetically based will add sometimes read much better than that most other times. They experience this erratically and is not the result of anything other than timing. If someone has acquired a language disability experience tends through be constant without this dynamic nature of good days vs. bad days sundaes you can read really well and other days you can get your cat. Remediation and relearning can be extremely effective in acquired disabilities. My wife is a physical therapist and has worked for over 30 years in Rehab. Her specialty is head trauma and stroke. We have discussed this many times and a dynamic nature of the symptoms does not occur when someone has in acquired disability. Remediation do is far more effective when the disability has been acquired.<br><br> The reason that people can do to movie theater and experience a movie in 3D the is because the glasses that you must wear modify the timing in the perception of the information received by the retina. It is to be altering of this timing that the major looks as if it were in 3D. Dr. Talull's research at Rutgers University has also pointed out timing errors. Dr. Margaret Livingston at Harvard also found timing problems. The type of timing and I'm referring to when I say that it is a perceptual disability caused by a timing error in one of the processes I'm referring to this more subtle type of timing problem. I believe that the processes are cyclical and one of the more to among our out of sync with the others. Eventually however unbroken clock will tell the correct time twice a day. So every once in a while all the processes are in sync and the person with the disability seems asymptomatic. A short time later however the symptoms are all back again. When this happens is very confusing for not only the person with the disability but also the person who's trying to help him. You think yourself lovely god inanimate later they can do it and your scratching your head thinking you did it a minute ago. But this experience gives credibility to the individual with the disability but they're just not trying hard enough.<br><br> Up one of the major problems with our society is that if you have a disability you are presumed to be less competent. This is true regardless of the disability. If to people apply for a job and one person is slightly more qualified and the other hand that person is also on amputated, the job will be given to the other person because the assumption is that you have an amputation you're not as competent as somebody who does not. Incredible as this may be it is directly addressed in the Americans with Disability Act. A person who does not have a disability but is believed to have a disability is covered under the act.<br><br> I believe that it is essential to understand what is causing a symptom of difficulty in reading, difficulty in writing, difficulty in that, and so on in order to determine what the best intervention might be. There are some who have difficulties in these areas because they have not have an opportunity to learn. There are others who may haven't difficulty due to dramatic emotional experiences. There are others who may haven't difficulty because they did not learn or do not understand how the phonemes are associated the letters of the alphabet. And they are those who have a perceptual deficit disability that is not caused by a learning problem of any kind and therefore cannot be remediated. Many people have said that this may be true in only a few cases did not in the vast majority of cases. I disagree with this and my disagreement is supported by the research.<br><br> Here is an excerpt from an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, August 1997.<br><br> <font size=3D2>"OUTCOME IN ADOLESCENCE AND YOUNG ADULTHOOD<br><br> Well designed follow up studies have repeatedly shown that reading disabilities persist into late adolescence and young adulthood (Maughan, 1995) </font><font size=3D1>. </font><font size=3D2>Comprehension skills may improve, but the progress of poor readers is often slower than that of their normal reading peers. General intelligence and initial severity of reading disorder are the most consistent predictors of early adult reading levels. Reading comprehension and word recognition skills can continue to improve well into adulthood, but this seems dependent on experience and practice with literacy materials. The most consistent finding across studies, however, is that adults who received the diagnosis of reading disability as children continue to have problems with phonological coding when reading or performing phonemic awareness tasks (Bruck, 1985, 1992, Pennington et al., 1990) These difficulties are particularly evident when spelling (Adelman and Vogel, 1991; Denckla, 1993) and reading nonwords or unfamiliar words (Elbro et al., 1994; Pennington et al., 1987; Scarborough, 1984). In addition, a slower reading rate is typical of adults identified as reading-disabled in childhood (Denckla, 1993; Johnson, 1987). With adequate supports, children with reading problems can make good educational progress, although they take longer to achieve a given level of competence compared with nondisabled controls (Maughan, 1995)."<br><br> This does support the idea that phonetic awareness is not the major cause of the difficulty in reading. I do think that a major problem is that there are so many different definitions of these disabilities and the label is such a catch all for everything that it becomes difficult to communicate. It might be quite a contribution to the field for this list to develop a definition of terms that is more specific and descriptive in determining appropriate interventions. Personally I feel that a multi-strategic approach leading to the educational success of the individual is most important.<br><br> Something to think about.<br><br> <br> Sorry this was so long.<br><br> Clif<br><br> <x-tab> </x-tab><br><br> <br><br> </font></html> --=====================_2612068==_.ALT--
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