The Dyslexic Advantage (25 page)

If Ben couldn't read, how was he able to earn a bachelor's degree from the prestigious Wesleyan University, a master's from the University of Edinburgh, and a combined J.D./M.B.A. from Stanford? Ben argues that the key to his success was his use of assistive technologies and other educational accommodations. We often describe accommodations as “interventions that get you out of unproductive activities and into productive ones.” Ben adds the following helpful description: “Accommodations are a ramp for a wheelchair. They're a modification to a process that is still true to the end goal: the test is still the test, and the knowledge is still the knowledge, but accommodations provide a different way to gain access to it. I found that metaphor of a ramp to be a really powerful one.”

One of the accommodations Ben found most helpful was recorded books. Like many individuals with dyslexia, Ben's primary access to recorded books was through the nonprofit organization RFB&D (
www.rfbd.org
), whose recordings he found to be invaluable. However, when he reached the even more demanding environment of professional school, he found that conventional recordings were no longer adequate. “I went to Stanford for a combined law and business school program, and they had an outstanding student disabilities office with everything for dyslexics. So I had a talking computer, and I had books on tape, but I found the latter to be problematic because if you're listening to text being read out loud at a normal speaking pace, you're actually listening at about one-third the speed that most people can read—and that wasn't good enough for me to keep up with my classmates.” After careful searching, Ben found a solution that had been adopted by many visually impaired people: “I moved over to digital text.”

By digital text, Ben means text that's been encoded in digital form so it can be read aloud by a text-to-speech program on a computer or other electronic device. Anything you type into a word processor becomes digital text, and according to Ben, the big advantage of digital text is speed. “You can listen to digital text much faster than analog text recordings—in some cases up to ten times the spoken rate, and over time you can train yourself to be comfortable with ultrafast digital text as a way of getting access to information. That's how people with visual impairments process text, and I learned that model.”

Right off the bat, Ben was able to listen to digital text at two to three times the rate of spoken text. This was already a huge advantage, but over the next five years he became an even faster listener. “The ability to listen very quickly is built through a series of microsteps with a few significant turning points, but it's definitely a process. It's not like you take a pill and immediately you're good.” Ben mentioned that one essential key to maximizing listening speed is to try many different electron voices to find the one that seems easiest to listen to.

Ben found digital texts to be a fully adequate approach to learning. “I never touched a book in law school. I learned to abandon reading. That was the only approach that allowed me to keep up with all the assignments. I chose a totally different road than most students, because for me going through the book road was like inching over an unpaved road, while going through my alternative formats was like speeding down the autobahn.”

Another person we spoke with who has found accelerated listening to be a big help in professional school is novelist and medical student Blake Charlton. “I've discovered that while I'm not a fast reader, I'm a really fast listener. I can listen quite comfortably to a lecture at three times normal speed, and I don't have any trouble comprehending. I can back up when I don't understand the concepts, but I rarely misunderstand the words. With the technology that's out there, I think that learning to rely more on listening when you're young could be a great boon for dyslexics. Recorded books helped me out a great deal when I was younger, but if I could have listened at double speed, that would have been life changing.”

The use of technology is sometimes met with skepticism—or even active opposition—by educators and reading specialists who believe that it interferes with efforts to teach children to read. Ben Foss finds this attitude seriously misguided. “This overemphasis on early reading intervention and lack of emphasis on other aspects of reading is just so silly.” Using both remediation and accommodation is a much better approach. Let me be clear about this. I believe strongly that there's an appropriate role for phonics training and all that, but sometimes you hit a point of diminishing returns where an hour spent doing therapies isn't nearly as valuable as an hour spent focusing on accommodations, and where the accommodations will do much more to affect long-term outcome.

“I've also found that exposure to language by itself improves literacy, which is your ability to comprehend and access literate information, as opposed to simply knowing how to read. Exposure to language improves your vocabulary, your knowledge base, and your ability to seek content that you find interesting. I'll give you a great example. One kid got an Intel Reader, and he told us, ‘I used the Reader to read the rule book for the game Risk, and I found out my friends were cheating!' That kid is now fired up about getting inside of texts because he's always wanted to invade France [in Risk mode only!], and he now knows how. He's discovered that literacy—or access to literature—is power. That's why all kids should start out with both visual and auditory exposure to literature and literate information in all its forms.”

In recent years a growing number of prominent educators have reached a similar conclusion. Dr. Lynda Katz is the president of Landmark College, an accredited junior college in Putney, Vermont, with a remarkable record of helping students with dyslexia, attention deficits, and other learning challenges successfully transition into college or professional school. Dr. Katz speaks enthusiastically about the hundreds of students she has observed firsthand benefitting from the use of assistive technologies. “I have an incredible bias for assistive technology. At Landmark, we began using assistive technologies as accommodations, but I really think they're remedial—that is, that their use improves reading function. I've had so many students who've used them who when they get ready to leave Landmark feel like they just don't need them as much. The assistive devices and the exposure to texts they bring really seem to enhance students' literacy skills and improve their reading. Drill and drill and drill just doesn't seem the way to go.”

We wish every school would take this more balanced and flexible view of assistive technologies like recorded books and text-to-speech software—particularly for students who are still working to improve their decoding and reading fluency skills. This two-pronged approach gives students with dyslexia the same opportunities to expand their general knowledge base, enrich their vocabulary, and improve their other high-level literacy skills that other students already enjoy. It would likely also—as Ben Foss and Lynda Katz have noted—improve the speed with which they master reading skills.

Finally, parents can play a special role in creating a home environment that encourages greater literacy for struggling readers. Studies have shown that children whose parents engage them in conversations about important and challenging topics at home adapt more quickly to learning from literate texts. Parents should also make sure struggling readers are given access to the material in books by reading aloud to them, and by providing exposure to technologies like books on tape, text-to-speech reading programs, or worthwhile documentary films.

Writing

M
any individuals with dyslexia have the potential to become not only competent but even highly skilled writers. In previous chapters, we've introduced you to several dyslexic individuals who, despite early challenges with reading and writing, have gone on to become extremely talented writers. This pattern is far more common than many people realize.

Typically, when individuals with dyslexia fully develop their writing skills, their mature writing reflects many of the MIND strengths we've described, including the abilities to see distant and unusual connections and associations; view things from different perspectives; see big-picture gist and context; show strengths in scene-based memory and imagery; think in cases and episodes rather than in abstract definitions or generalizations; and engage in mental simulation, prediction, and insight, to see patterns that others often miss. These abilities often begin to show up in the writing of individuals with dyslexia during adolescence and young adulthood, though many dyslexic individuals hit their full stride as writers only during their early to mid twenties, or even later.

Even individuals with dyslexia who ultimately become highly skilled writers will nearly always struggle early in school with the fine-detail features of writing. These difficulties can affect functions like the physical and mechanical skills needed for legible and accurate handwriting; the rule- and sound-based patterns underlying spelling and grammar; the structural and organizational patterns underlying sentence, paragraph, and essay construction; and understanding which details to include and exclude in their writing. For most individuals with dyslexia, fluent and automatic mastery of these skills requires much more time to achieve than it does for other students. Often, it also requires more explicit instruction and greater practice imitating good writing as well.

In this chapter, we'll discuss steps that can help dyslexic students become competent or even highly skilled writers. We'll focus on several important levels of writing and on the role that both technology and the proper use of dyslexic advantages can play in helping dyslexic students develop their writing abilities.

Learning to write by hand is often a major challenge for children with dyslexia. Severe problems with handwriting are common among younger dyslexic students. Though Blake Charlton is now an accomplished novelist, he struggled greatly with handwriting: “In special ed class I failed a lot of papers because the teacher couldn't read anything I wrote.”

Problems writing by hand can affect any student with dyslexia, but they're often most severe for students with significant working memory or procedural learning challenges. Writing by hand depends almost entirely on automatic, fine-detail skills. These skills allow us to form letters neatly, consistently, and in the proper spatial orientation; properly space letters and words; use margins; and master conventions (like capital letters) and punctuation (like commas and periods). Students who haven't fully mastered these automatic handwriting skills must use conscious attention (working memory) to perform them. As a result, they have less “mental desk space” left over for formulating sentences, organizing thoughts, or checking for errors, so their work is often littered with
overload
mistakes—that is, with more frequent or severe mistakes in spelling, word omissions, inaccurate word substitutions, poor mechanics, improper grammar or syntax, or just general messiness.

Students who struggle to write by hand usually need a combination of specific training (remediation) and accommodations. Training should begin using a program of explicit, rule-based, multisensory approaches to letter formation. Our favorite program is Handwriting Without Tears (
www.hwtears.com
), which resembles the Orton-Gillingham approaches we discussed in the last chapter by taking advantage of spatial and kinesthetic imagery strengths and using multisensory practice to turn instruction into a more memorable experience. This approach is often administered in schools (sometimes through a school-based occupational therapist), but because it's relatively easy to understand, parents can use it with their children at home as well.