It is often alleged, frequently without rigorous evidence and on the basis of only a case or two, that ‘dyslexics’ have special attributes perhaps in compensation for their special difficulties. This is a lovely, warm idea. Unfortunately it is probably only that. Herrington’s review of the literature concludes that the case for 'dyslexics' being unusually blessed with particular aptitudes (such as enhanced visuo-spatial skills) to extraordinary degrees is weak. Her own analysis of 'dyslexic' ABE students’ subjective reports, however, leads her to suggest that they nonetheless approach literacy from unusual perceptual angles. Some, she claims, say they experience, or need to experience, meaning in written or spoken language visually and graphically - as picture or at least metaphor - before understanding it. They report that they are obliged to 'switch modalities' to find meaning. They also report that their difficulties with literacy are specifically related to the difficulty they experience trying to grasp, or express, meaning in the inexorably linear and sequential medium of text. Memorisation is often anecdotally reported as particularly problematic for 'dyslexics'. Herrington claims 'dyslexic' ABE students often report that their efforts to memorise demand visualisation. These students report that they find it difficult to memorise ideas linguistically but can memorise them as visual images. Even more controversially, perhaps, she asserts that 'dyslexics' may experience time in unusual ways, sometimes as 'a total blank' or 'as if it is a separate dimension' (ibid. p. 22).

The thesis that some people have radically different cognitive styles from the majority of the population, and that these are innate, remains highly speculative (Coffield et al 2004 is a useful and appropriately critical review). Many schemes for assessing learning style are aggressively marketed and much money is made from this presently fashionable theory. Sadly, the science is correspondingly selectively reported and truth obscured. The crucial educational question, seldom properly addressed, is to what extent these different learning styles really exist and genuinely relate to underlying and innate cognitive styles, and to what extent they may have been adopted, induced, learned or taught.

To what degree is a ‘learning style’ natural and to what degree may it be learned? This difficult and inconvenient, but educationally fundemental, question is not well understood and is generally, but absolutely improperly, ignored. Many students indeed appear to have strong preferences for learning in particular ways - for example many students seek to master literacy purely phonically, regarding literacy solely as a matter of ‘sounding out’. A learning style advocate will conclude that such a student has an innate bias towards learning through phonic attack; that they experience and learn best through sounds. A sceptic will want to know whether this bias is really innate or whether it has been learned (Johnson 1985). May the student have learned that phonic attack is the only way to do it? Have repeated patterns of success and failure, and insistent teaching approaches, taught him his ‘style’? Indeed, Johnston & Allington (1996 p. 999) quote Barr as saying that

…whereas more able readers show little trace of instructional method past the second grade, less able readers appear to learn narrowly what they are taught; indeed they tend to show quite marked effects of their instructional focus.

A fundamentally important educational dilemma immediately arises from all this. If the learning style a student appears to exhibit is genuinely innate, that is to say that if his brain really is hardwired to operate in that manner, then his learning had best be done using this style. However, if the student has merely learned to use this style then he is missing out on, and must urgently be taught, different styles. Instead of reinforcing a single, learned cognitive style and thereby restricting our student’s repertoire we should encourage him to learn and use a variety of approaches, as we do ourselves. If a style really is innate, then we should teach to it. If, however, it is a learned style we should do precisely the opposite.

It has been my experience that students invariably (and I mean invariably) benefit from deliberate exposure to learning approaches at variance to their apparent ‘learning style’ - by learning, and learning to deploy, a more varied range of approaches to their literacy (see notes to chapters four, five and seven). The student, for example, who employs only phonological attack, the student who doggedly ‘sounds out’, needs practice in visual approaches. It has been my experience that absolutely all such students do indeed learn, willingly deploy and benefit from, such different ‘styles’; an observation which leads me to conclude that their apparent ‘learning style’ was itself learned rather than innate. Fluent literates in the real world do not rely on a single approach to literacy, a single ‘literate style’, why should a student?