Classroom practice should always have a firm and respectable intellectual basis.
(Waterland 1988 p. 10)
If we are to keep company for a while it behoves me to tell you something of my self, and of the genesis and purpose of this book. The books of this nature that I like best usually seem to me to have been written to answer their authors' own questions. Thus it is with this one. In it I answer the fundamental questions I had when I first began as a youthful volunteer, but I also ruminate about some of the more controversial ones I grapple with now, as a much greyer one.
I come from the world of adult literacy and inevitably show some bias in that direction. This does not mean that what I write applies only to adult literacy. Literacy is literacy at whatever age it is to be learned and there are thoughts and ideas for every teacher here. Indeed I believe you will find the journey both more human and more enlightening precisely because my bias shows.
The whole project arises from my own ignorance (steadily, if slowly, becoming less absolute) about why? Why do we use the methods we do? Why are there so many of them? Why are they so various? Whose idea are they anyway? Why do some feel good while others do not? Why do apparently contradictory methods often work equally well? Why do some succeed when others fail? Why is some stuff remembered but some forgotten? Why does some method engage and excite but some intimidate or repel? How do we read and why should we spell? Can there really be different styles of learning? Why do such passionate, even virulent, debates reverberate year on year in what ought to be a quiet backwater of science? Why don't we all agree, after all this time and after so much battle? Is resolution to be found and, if so, where? Can you really be specifically literacy-disabled - can you really be ‘dyslexic’?
I started teaching literacy in the nineteen seventies, in what was uncompromisingly called Adult Literacy. I found, almost at once, that my profound ignorance of any of the theory behind literacy acquisition and performance was a very concrete handicap indeed. If I hadn't a clue, say, how spelling was actually managed in the mind (and indeed I had not) how could I tell what was or wasn’t good method? How should I ever develop? How might I progress from the oddly stultifying, sometimes bizarre and often frankly unsuccessful little collection of teaching ideas I had been given? When a method failed, why was that? How could I do better? What could I do differently, assuming I didn't want endlessly to repeat those lessons I had been given at my ‘training’? What was success? How would I recognise it? Why was there so much failure? Why did students recall so little? Why was progress so slow? Why could students not perform in ‘real life’, as well as they seemed to in the classroom? (And see Abadzi 1994, Brooks et al 2001, Charnley & Jones 1981, Kambouri & Francis 1994, Sheehan-Holt & Smith 2000 for some further discussion of the effectiveness, or frequently ineffectiveness, of our tuition at that time.)
The original purpose of all this was simply to examine the concept of dyslexia appropriately. However, in order to do this properly, we need to understand a great many other ideas first. Hence the first three chapters of this essay. The other ideas we will look into en route are also fundamentally important to teaching and learning. This is why I make no apology for the distance we will travel before reaching our final goal - this and the fact that the route takes us over a lot of deeply interesting ground which is rewarding in itself.
I will lay my cards face up right from the start. My own experience, thinking and study and my own research have all convinced me that developmental dyslexia (at least as presently conceived) probably doesn’t exist. I very, very, very much regret that this observation will instantly enrage some of you. Perhaps you will feel that I am denying that there are people who have unusual difficulty acquiring and using literacy. Perhaps you will feel that I am denying that such people need, and should have, extra and appropriate help. I can only say that neither of these is remotely true and respectfully ask that you read further before making your judgement. If you can bring yourself to read this book with an open mind you will see why I think dyslexia may not exist and why, even although it is probably non-existent, I believe it causes such harm to its victims. I am not alone in my scepticism, either. A very substantial number, maybe even a quiet majority, of teachers of literacy privately doubt the reality of dyslexia. They must be silent, though. Most teachers are contracted to an educational institution. Dyslexia is recognised in UK law as a learning disability. All UK educational establishments are required to accept the reality of such disabilities, to screen for them and to have relevant remedial policies in place for dealing with them. None of their teaching staff is at liberty publicly to question dyslexia. Indeed they are required to do exactly the opposite. It’s not a conspiracy, but it does bias the debate!