So, it remains unclear whether there really are significant, and significantly different, learners who consistently rely on radically different learning styles based on innate cognitive styles. At an immediate, educationally practical level the recognition and exploitation, or management, of various cognitive and learning styles may (or, as we have just seen, may not) be good practice. It remains questionable whether variation in cognitive style will ever offer a satisfactory alternative explanation for 'dyslexia' or much in the way of genuine pedagogical insight.
The question everyone asks when faced with scepticism about dyslexia is ‘Well, what is it, then?” To which the opening reply must be that there is no single ‘it” for it to be. There are so many other, more prosaic explanations for peculiar difficulty with literacy, each more likely than a highly selective miswiring of the brain. (And ‘Occam’s razor’ springs to mind.) A professor at London University’s Royal Veterinary College forty years ago used to cry, in exasperation, ‘Common things are common!’ - and so they are. He meant to drive home that a clinician has no right to diagnose the rare and esoteric until the everyday has been considered and eliminated. What is sauce for the clinician is sauce for the educationalist (and everyone else too). I am about to run through a mass of quotes, each of which, I hope, illuminates a particular reason for literacy failure. This is the stuff of everyday; much less scientifically exciting (and more probable) than a ‘dys’. For exactly that reason, these, or other, explanations are much more legitimate early proposals in our quest for a ‘diagnosis’. This list of possible causes is, incidentally, certainly not definitive, you will have many revealing quotes and further ideas of your own.
‘Reading and writing are not just cognitive activities – feelings run through them.’ (Barton 1994 p. 48) & ‘Her reading problem was mostly the fear that she really couldn’t learn to read and the shame she would feel if this proved to be so.’ (Holt 1982 p. 37) & ‘While I was at school I was educated to feel shame and worthlessness, to feel doubt in my own abilities and self-hatred. I was educated to feel small and worthless.’ (Miles & Varma 1995 p. 65) & ‘It is their intelligent response to a perceived problem that appears to prevent them from developing normal reading behaviours.’ (Johnston 1985 p.165) & ‘Bog off! I ain’t reading that babby stuff!’ (Martin 1989 p. 1) & ‘The more I thought I couldn’t do it the worse I went!’ & ‘You couldn’t do it anyway so you didn’t try.’ (Newsham 1988 pp. 15 & 16) & [you learn to] ‘… do something else, that’s to deceive … mainly yourself.’ (Mellor 1988 p. 42) & [the poor readers] ‘… got beat more than anyone … they got more stupid by every day.’ (in Goleman et al 1984 p. 46) & ‘there was a terror campaign waged against me to get me to spell properly.’ (Miles & Varma 1995 p. 65) & [all quotes from a variety of ABE students] ‘The teacher was only interested in those who were bright.’ (this one, sadly, comes up all the time) but also ‘There was over forty children in her class - she had no chance.’ & ‘I never had stories read to me.’ & ‘There wasn’t a book in the house.’ & ‘Where we lived, in the country, there was no kids - I just mucked about in the mud.’ and my favourite, from an African-American brought up around Alabama, ‘I went to school on the days it rained.’ And there are, of course, many more where they came from - complexity & wisdom enough without recourse to neuropathology. (and see Arnold 1994, Stanovich 1986, Tizard 1993, Tizard & Hughes 1984, Wixson & Lipson 1996.)
In a long and rewarding article Keith Stanovich (1986) writes that ‘... the cognitive consequences of the acquisition of literacy may be profound’ and that ‘... the knowledge base of less skilled readers may be less developed because of their lack of reading practice’ (both quotes from p. 374). Learning (and using) literacy may make for greater cognitive ability and increase our ability to catch, and hold, ‘information’ including literacy itself. Using literacy reinforces literacy. On page 380 Stanovich also says that ‘... a strong bootstrapping mechanism that causes major individual differences in the development of reading skill is the volume of reading experience’. Those who are good at something will do more of it; those who do more of something get better at it and do more of it... Especially is this so with literacy. The good reader in, say, middle school, reads several millions of words a year, whereas the poor reader reads only a few thousand (and probably hates every one). We all know what practice makes. This is the ‘Matthew effect’, an extremely important, but often overlooked, factor in literacy acquisition and maintenance, as well, perhaps, as in much more general cognition.