Option A: Developmental Dyslexia: Explanations and Responses

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Recommended: My Personal Experience With Literacy

1. Dyslexia Research

Just as our current understanding of literacy has formed from multiple lines of research over a diverse range of disciplines, so has our understanding of dyslexia. The multifaceted research in both these related fields has led to a wide scope of understanding for both the terms ‘literacy’ and ‘dyslexia’. As subject specialists concentrate on investigations in their own disciplines; others attempt to draw these divergent lines of research together to form coherent images of both literacy and dyslexia that can be amalgamated with the political context of policy-makers in governments and institutions as well as those views of pressure groups such as the British Dyslexia Association.

Rassool (2009) was aiming towards a paradigm, a generally accepted perspective, on literacy, when she devised a concept of literacy as a ‘regionalised field of study’ (Rassool, 2009, p.21). In order to account for the multifaceted research, social and political influences that affect our concept of literacy, she developed a conceptual framework with lenses to study the individual areas which can be discussed as separate entities or linked together. In a similar fashion Morton and Frith (cited in Reid, 2009, p.14) discuss a causal modelling framework which explains dyslexia as a function of the interactions of the environment with the three factors of biology, cognition and behaviour.

Figure1: Causal Modelling framework (after Frith, 1995, p.11)

From figure 1 it can be seen that there are links between all three layers of the model and that the environment can interact with any one of these layers.

The Biological Level

The biological level examines the potential biological origins of the behavioural difficulties that are seen...

... middle of paper ...

...ge, vol. 39, pp. 289–301.

Lovegrove, W. (1991) ‘Spatial frequency processing in dyslexic and normal readers’, in Stein, J.F. (ed.) Vision and Visual Dyslexia, London, Macmillan.

Oxford University Press (2011) Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Available from: http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0212430 [Accessed 15th March 2011)

Rassool, N. (2009) ‘Literacy: in Search of a Paradigm’ in Soler, J., Fletcher-Campbell, F. & Reid, G. (eds.) Understanding Difficulties in Literacy Development: Issues and Concepts, London, Sage, pp.7-31.

Reid, G. (2009) Dyslexia: a practitioner’s handbook, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell.

The International Dyslexia Association (2008) Basics Fact Sheet, Baltimore, The International Dyslexia Association. Available from: http://www.interdys.org/ewebeditpro5/upload/BasicsFactSheet.pdf Accessed 15th March 2011]

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