[NIFL-LD:3823] RE: NIFL-LD:3810 NO Support for phonetic

From: clifwillard (clifwillard@home.com)
Date: Sun Jan 13 2002 - 02:23:02 EST


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Subject: [NIFL-LD:3823] RE: NIFL-LD:3810 NO Support for phonetic
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Art,

What you say sounds very good but the facts do not support you.

To begin with, there is no correlation between acquired language 
disabilities and genetic language disabilities. They have different 
origins. You simply cannot equate one with the other. The same is true for 
ADHD. Your experience is that of a person who recovered from a head injury. 
Brain damage and injury is a completely different ball game and has nothing 
what so ever to do with genetic language disabilities. There is absolutely 
no correlation and absolutely no support for the generalizing that you are 
doing. Clearly you understand the process of rehabilitation  from a TBI but 
clearly you do not have any understanding of the general population of 
language disabled who are for the most part were born with the disability. 
Further, there is no evidence that the person with a language disability 
has any brain damage at all. There is nothing broken or damaged, it is a 
timing error.

The emotional difficulties a person develops is a result of others not 
understanding their disability can be profound and life long. You state 
that you have a masters in Rehab Counseling. I teach in a graduate Rehab 
counseling program and have spent many years training Rehab counselors. 
There is nothing in the curriculum that qualifies you to be diagnosing and 
treating emotional and mental disorders. You are not licensed by any state 
board nor does your CRC qualify or certify you to diagnose and treat 
emotional problems and you doing so is a violation of your ethical 
responsibilities. There is a reason why people must complete programs, 
internships, years of supervision, and pass state licensing exams to 
diagnose and treat mental and emotional disorders. According to you, you do 
not have that training and your comments reflect that.

"I've just seen far too many children and adults make complete turnarounds 
from those conditions and resume normal functioning parameters in 
"learning" with quite a number of those surpassing their peers in measured 
reading capability."

I have seen this too, but NOT when the person was born with the reading 
disability. You are confusing rehabilitation from a TBI with a genetic 
language disability.

"Therefore I simply refuse to administer a limiting prognosis to ANY human 
being regardless of their condition or capability..."

That is exactly what you are doing and what I was referring to in my 
response to Lucille. You are telling people that if they do what you say, 
they will be able to read as a person without a reading disability. You are 
therefore placing that person under constant unrealistic expectations. This 
is the definition of emotional abuse. You are severely limiting their 
access to education and all that education and higher education would offer 
them. You are limiting them to a world of ignorance and feelings of not 
being smart enough to learn to "read like everybody else." You are denying 
these folks who come to you for help a choice.

Third is professional influence.  Negative professional influence can
and does quite often set up a system of self defeating thought
processing on the part of the child and the parent(s) and ultimately may
become the most daunting to overcome.

You are in fact that very negative influence. Your complete disregard for 
the facts creates an atmosphere of failure and negative self esteem.
You have no right to do that to anyone. You have done an admirable job of 
recovering from you TBI but because you project your circumstances onto all 
others with language disabilities, you are denying them the very 
opportunities you were given. To accept their disability and make decisions 
that minimize the amount they are disabled by that disability. The facts do 
not support your very misguided beliefs.

Your comments below reflect a complete lack of understanding of these 
disabilities and the various methods of resolving them. You also 
demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the emotional difficulties 
and the appropriate methods for resolving those difficulties.

You might want to take a look at the facts.

You also chose not answered my questions at the end of my response to 
Lucille. So I will ask you directly.

What criteria do you use to determine what program to purchase and use with 
your clients?
What are the criteria that you use to measure your results?
How do you define a good result?
If phonetic awareness is the cause, than why does progress in reading using 
these OG+ methods stop at the fifth grade?
What do you tell someone when they get stuck in at the fifth grade level 
and cannot go any further?

Why do you think the Recording for the Blind changed their name to the 
Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic???? Why are so many students with 
reading disabilities using books on tape and computers to access printed 
language. These are college and university students and they cannot read 
above a 5th grade level. They are however graduating and completing Ph.,D. 
programs as well. Why would you knowingly deny your clients and children 
that same opportunity? What gives you the right to to that? Most have had 
remediation and years of trying to learn how to read. They finally accept 
that they cannot and get on with getting on. This obsession with a fantasy 
that you can teach a person with a reading disability to read as a person 
without a reading disability is ignorant.

You should be commended for your rehabilitation but your recovery has 
little or nothing to do with those with a genetic language disability and 
there is no information anywhere that says otherwise. Think what you could 
be giving your clients if you opened your eyes, got outside yourself, and 
started paying attention to your clients.

I do not mean to be harsh but platitudes simply do not cut it.

I don't believe in LD, ADD, ADHD, as PERMANENT situations. This is utter 
nonsense. It is this attitude that creates the failures and emotional 
problems, and is the biggest problem of all. You could not have improved 
your condition if you did not accept that you had a TBI. Yet you deny 
others the opportunity to accept their disabilities and disabilities. 
Instead you call them something else and therefore prevent them from 
accepting their disabilities and learning to deal with them.

It is not helping someone to relegate them to pushing a broom because of a 
reading disability when they might otherwise complete a college education 
and possibly a graduate degree. This is what is happening though and with 
complete disregard for your clients and the facts.

You have to ask, are you rehabilitating or disabling????

BTW What are the statistics on results for adult literacy programs? How 
many learn to read on a level with their IQ and achievement in other areas? 
How many leave Adult Literacy and complete college educations having 
learned how to read?? How many do not complete their education because they 
cannot be competitive academically due to a reading deficit?? How many with 
reading disabilities who come to Adult Literacy programs could complete 
their educations and get on with succeeding if Adult Literacy programs 
taught accommodations, rights under 504 and ADA, self-advocacy, and the use 
of technology to accommodate their disability so thay were not disabled by 
the disability??? You might ask, "Who has the disability? Your clients or you?


Clif Willard


symptoms and At 04:00 PM 1/9/02 -0500, you wrote:
>This is actually a response to Clif Willard's response to Lucille
>Cuttler's post which focused on her 14 yr old son, and can be referenced
>in the nifl archives.
>
>Clif.
>
>I believe "Phonetics" and it's effects on reading capability is directly
>related to several factors that are not connected to curriculum and
>which further are not considered in any "research" that I'm aware of and
>frankly I simply gave up trying to interpret current "research" and/or
>apply such to my practice when I found that little of what was reported
>as scientific fact actually held true in most situations.
>
>Of the several factors that I've noted as participants one is
>motivation.  Motivation can be and often is undermined by negative
>emotions. Where "learning" is concerned the negative emotions are
>usually set in place in the early school years when the child discovers
>that his lack of progress (for whatever reason) results in embarrassment
>and emotional pain.
>The resultant is that the child avoids returning to that environment.
>And I mean "avoids".  One way or the other the child will not
>participate in an environment that is emotionally painful.  If we MUST
>physically attend the environment then the possibility that the child
>will mentally remove him/herself is extremely likely.  You may find
>evidence of mental distraction specifically in the diagnostic criteria
>for ADD and ADHD.
>
>Second (not in any order) is repetetion.  If the necessary mental skill
>repetetion doesn't occur to a degree that permits strong neural pathway
>development then short term memory outlives it's usefulness and the
>brain never incorporates the new information as anything usable nor does
>it get transferred into long term memory where it may be used in the
>evaluation or decoding processes involved in 'reading'.
>
>Third is professional influence.  Negative professional influence can
>and does quite often set up a system of self defeating thought
>processing on the part of the child and the parent(s) and ultimately may
>become the most daunting to overcome. Many many times professional
>reports follow the child into adult-hood.  The quality of the
>assessment, diagnosis, and narrative is totally dependent on the
>capability of the assessor.  And I think you might agree with me when I
>say that we all don't see to eye on many aspects of human brain
>functioning.
>
>Fourth is self concept.  If a child believes him/herself to be "learning
>inadaquate" as a result of "professional advice or diagnosis" or
>significant-other influence (parents as an example), it will take 5
>times the work to disengage that pattern and open up or remove emotional
>blackades to permit the "learning" sequences to begin.  Self concept is
>also tied directly to the first three factors mentioned here.  One of
>the primary reasons I address self-concept issues first as the highest
>priority.
>
>"Curriculum" could be considered at this point if all other factors have
>received remedy.  And without a clear "understanding" of the decoding
>processes for the language it is highly improbable that the student will
>ever grow beyond his/her current level of expertise.  The truth is that
>to be able to decode any language you must "know" the code and have
>better than a casual association with the skills involved.  If you only
>have a rudimentary understanding of the code, then you can only decode
>at a rudimentary level.
>
>At age ten I lost the ability to express my thoughts verbally and in
>writing as a direct result of a head injury, reading was also affected
>but to a lesser degree.  That was NO speech, NO writing, and minimal
>reading. To bore you with the details of survival and reestablishment of
>those skills would take more time than we have here.  Nonetheless, I
>learned to speak again fluently and to write fluently following better
>than 30 years of less than adaquate language reception and expression.
>As stated before in other posts, at age 43 I began working with the
>disabled population in a rehab setting, earned a masters in rehab
>counseling and then went on to adult literacy.  I don't believe in LD,
>ADD, ADHD, as PERMANENT situations.  I've just seen far too many
>children and adults make complete turnarounds from those conditions and
>resume normal functioning parameters in "learning" with quite a number
>of those surpassing their peers in measured reading capability.  Nothing
>is "black or white", fact is it's all gray and anything is possible.
>Therefore I simply refuse to administer a limiting prognosis to ANY
>human being regardless of their condition or capability (refer back to
>factor # 3 and 4 above pls).
>
>Art
>
>
>Art LaChance
>Gilmer Learning Center
>Ellijay, GA

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<html>
Art,<br><br>
What you say sounds very good but the facts do not support you.<br><br>
To begin with, there is no correlation between acquired language
disabilities and genetic language disabilities. They have different
origins. You simply cannot equate one with the other. The same is true
for ADHD. Your experience is that of a person who recovered from a head
injury. Brain damage and injury is a completely different ball game and
has nothing what so ever to do with genetic language disabilities. There
is absolutely no correlation and absolutely no support for the
generalizing that you are doing. Clearly you understand the process of
rehabilitation&nbsp; from a TBI but clearly you do not have any
understanding of the general population of language disabled who are for
the most part were born with the disability. Further, there is no
evidence that the person with a language disability has any brain damage
at all. There is nothing broken or damaged, it is a timing error.
<br><br>
The emotional difficulties a person develops is a result of others not
understanding their disability can be profound and life long. You state
that you have a masters in Rehab Counseling. I teach in a graduate Rehab
counseling program and have spent many years training Rehab counselors.
There is nothing in the curriculum that qualifies you to be diagnosing
and treating emotional and mental disorders. You are not licensed by any
state board nor does your CRC qualify or certify you to diagnose and
treat emotional problems and you doing so is a violation of your ethical
responsibilities. There is a reason why people must complete programs,
internships, years of supervision, and pass state licensing exams to
diagnose and treat mental and emotional disorders. According to you, you
do not have that training and your comments reflect that. <br><br>
&quot;<b>I've just seen far too many children and adults make complete
turnarounds from those conditions and resume normal functioning
parameters in &quot;learning&quot; with quite a number of those
surpassing their peers in measured reading 
capability.</b>&quot;<br><br>
I have seen this too, but NOT when the person was born with the reading
disability. You are confusing rehabilitation from a TBI with a genetic
language disability.<br><br>
&quot;<b>Therefore I simply refuse to administer a limiting prognosis to
ANY human being regardless of their condition or
capability...&quot;<br><br>
</b>That is exactly what you are doing and what I was referring to in my
response to Lucille. You are telling people that if they do what you say,
they will be able to read as a person without a reading disability. You
are therefore placing that person under constant unrealistic
expectations. This is the definition of emotional abuse. You are severely
limiting their access to education and all that education and higher
education would offer them. You are limiting them to a world of ignorance
and feelings of not being smart enough to learn to &quot;read like
everybody else.&quot; You are denying these folks who come to you for
help a choice. <br><br>
<b>Third is professional influence.&nbsp; Negative professional influence
can<br>
and does quite often set up a system of self defeating thought<br>
processing on the part of the child and the parent(s) and ultimately
may<br>
become the most daunting to overcome.<br><br>
</b>You are in fact that very negative influence. Your complete disregard
for the facts creates an atmosphere of failure and negative self esteem.
<br>
You have no right to do that to anyone. You have done an admirable job of
recovering from you TBI but because you project your circumstances onto
all others with language disabilities, you are denying them the very
opportunities you were given. To accept their disability and make
decisions that minimize the amount they are disabled by that disability.
The facts do not support your very misguided beliefs.<br><br>
Your comments below reflect a complete lack of understanding of these
disabilities and the various methods of resolving them. You also
demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the emotional
difficulties and the appropriate methods for resolving those
difficulties. <br><br>
You might want to take a look at the facts. <br><br>
You also chose not answered my questions at the end of my response to
Lucille. So I will ask you directly.<br><br>
What criteria do you use to determine what program to purchase and use
with your clients?<br>
What are the criteria that you use to measure your results?<br>
How do you define a good result?<br>
If phonetic awareness is the cause, than why does progress in reading
using these OG+ methods stop at the fifth grade? <br>
What do you tell someone when they get stuck in at the fifth grade level
and cannot go any further?<br><br>
Why do you think the Recording for the Blind changed their name to the
Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic???? Why are so many students with
reading disabilities using books on tape and computers to access printed
language. These are college and university students and they cannot read
above a 5th grade level. They are however graduating and completing
Ph.,D. programs as well. Why would you knowingly deny your clients and
children that same opportunity? What gives you the right to to that? Most
have had remediation and years of trying to learn how to read. They
finally accept that they cannot and get on with getting on. This
obsession with a fantasy that you can teach a person with a reading
disability to read as a person without a reading disability is ignorant.
<br><br>
You should be commended for your rehabilitation but your recovery has
little or nothing to do with those with a genetic language disability and
there is no information anywhere that says otherwise. Think what you
could be giving your clients if you opened your eyes, got outside
yourself, and started paying attention to your clients. <br><br>
I do not mean to be harsh but platitudes simply do not cut it. <br><br>
<b>I don't believe in LD, ADD, ADHD, as PERMANENT situations</b>. This is
utter nonsense. It is this attitude that creates the failures and
emotional problems, and is the biggest problem of all. You could not have
improved your condition if you did not accept that you had a TBI. Yet you
deny others the opportunity to accept their disabilities and
disabilities. Instead you call them something else and therefore prevent
them from accepting their disabilities and learning to deal with them.
<br><br>
It is not helping someone to relegate them to pushing a broom because of
a reading disability when they might otherwise complete a college
education and possibly a graduate degree. This is what is happening
though and with complete disregard for your clients and the
facts.<br><br>
You have to ask, are you rehabilitating or disabling????<br><br>
BTW What are the statistics on results for adult literacy programs? How
many learn to read on a level with their IQ and achievement in other
areas? How many leave Adult Literacy and complete college educations
having learned how to read?? How many do not complete their education
because they cannot be competitive academically due to a reading
deficit?? How many with reading disabilities who come to Adult Literacy
programs could complete their educations and get on with succeeding if
Adult Literacy programs taught accommodations, rights under 504 and ADA,
self-advocacy, and the use of technology to accommodate their disability
so thay were not disabled by the disability??? You might ask, &quot;Who
has the disability? Your clients or you?<br>
&nbsp;<br><br>
Clif Willard<br><br>
<br>
symptoms and At 04:00 PM 1/9/02 -0500, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>This is actually a response to Clif
Willard's response to Lucille<br>
Cuttler's post which focused on her 14 yr old son, and can be
referenced<br>
in the nifl archives.<br><br>
Clif.<br><br>
I believe &quot;Phonetics&quot; and it's effects on reading capability is
directly<br>
related to several factors that are not connected to curriculum and<br>
which further are not considered in any &quot;research&quot; that I'm
aware of and<br>
frankly I simply gave up trying to interpret current &quot;research&quot;
and/or<br>
apply such to my practice when I found that little of what was
reported<br>
as scientific fact actually held true in most situations.<br><br>
Of the several factors that I've noted as participants one is<br>
motivation.&nbsp; Motivation can be and often is undermined by
negative<br>
emotions. Where &quot;learning&quot; is concerned the negative emotions
are<br>
usually set in place in the early school years when the child
discovers<br>
that his lack of progress (for whatever reason) results in
embarrassment<br>
and emotional pain.<br>
The resultant is that the child avoids returning to that
environment.<br>
And I mean &quot;avoids&quot;.&nbsp; One way or the other the child will
not<br>
participate in an environment that is emotionally painful.&nbsp; If we
MUST<br>
physically attend the environment then the possibility that the
child<br>
will mentally remove him/herself is extremely likely.&nbsp; You may
find<br>
evidence of mental distraction specifically in the diagnostic
criteria<br>
for ADD and ADHD.<br><br>
Second (not in any order) is repetetion.&nbsp; If the necessary mental
skill<br>
repetetion doesn't occur to a degree that permits strong neural
pathway<br>
development then short term memory outlives it's usefulness and the<br>
brain never incorporates the new information as anything usable nor
does<br>
it get transferred into long term memory where it may be used in 
the<br>
evaluation or decoding processes involved in 'reading'.<br><br>
Third is professional influence.&nbsp; Negative professional influence
can<br>
and does quite often set up a system of self defeating thought<br>
processing on the part of the child and the parent(s) and ultimately
may<br>
become the most daunting to overcome. Many many times professional<br>
reports follow the child into adult-hood.&nbsp; The quality of the<br>
assessment, diagnosis, and narrative is totally dependent on the<br>
capability of the assessor.&nbsp; And I think you might agree with me
when I<br>
say that we all don't see to eye on many aspects of human brain<br>
functioning.<br><br>
Fourth is self concept.&nbsp; If a child believes him/herself to be
&quot;learning<br>
inadaquate&quot; as a result of &quot;professional advice or
diagnosis&quot; or<br>
significant-other influence (parents as an example), it will take 5<br>
times the work to disengage that pattern and open up or remove
emotional<br>
blackades to permit the &quot;learning&quot; sequences to begin.&nbsp;
Self concept is<br>
also tied directly to the first three factors mentioned here.&nbsp; One
of<br>
the primary reasons I address self-concept issues first as the
highest<br>
priority.<br><br>
&quot;Curriculum&quot; could be considered at this point if all other
factors have<br>
received remedy.&nbsp; And without a clear &quot;understanding&quot; of
the decoding<br>
processes for the language it is highly improbable that the student
will<br>
ever grow beyond his/her current level of expertise.&nbsp; The truth is
that<br>
to be able to decode any language you must &quot;know&quot; the code and
have<br>
better than a casual association with the skills involved.&nbsp; If you
only<br>
have a rudimentary understanding of the code, then you can only
decode<br>
at a rudimentary level.<br><br>
At age ten I lost the ability to express my thoughts verbally and 
in<br>
writing as a direct result of a head injury, reading was also
affected<br>
but to a lesser degree.&nbsp; That was NO speech, NO writing, and
minimal<br>
reading. To bore you with the details of survival and reestablishment
of<br>
those skills would take more time than we have here.&nbsp; Nonetheless,
I<br>
learned to speak again fluently and to write fluently following
better<br>
than 30 years of less than adaquate language reception and
expression.<br>
As stated before in other posts, at age 43 I began working with the<br>
disabled population in a rehab setting, earned a masters in rehab<br>
counseling and then went on to adult literacy.&nbsp; I don't believe in
LD,<br>
ADD, ADHD, as PERMANENT situations.&nbsp; I've just seen far too
many<br>
children and adults make complete turnarounds from those conditions
and<br>
resume normal functioning parameters in &quot;learning&quot; with quite a
number<br>
of those surpassing their peers in measured reading capability.&nbsp;
Nothing<br>
is &quot;black or white&quot;, fact is it's all gray and anything is
possible.<br>
Therefore I simply refuse to administer a limiting prognosis to ANY<br>
human being regardless of their condition or capability (refer back
to<br>
factor # 3 and 4 above pls).<br><br>
Art<br><br>
<br>
Art LaChance<br>
Gilmer Learning Center<br>
Ellijay, GA</blockquote></html>

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