On 3 February, ACAMH will host a webinar ‘Rethinking reading disorders’.
We caught up with the presenter – Prof. Maggie Snowling, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford and Research Fellow at St John’s College – about her career, the topic, and her hopes for the event.
Looking back at your life and career, what first got you interested in reading disorders and how did you then come to specialise in them?
During my studies I was very interested in cognitive development, particularly atypical development, and research on autism was burgeoning at the time. I wanted to study the cognitive causes of autism, but then met Uta Frith, an expert in the area, and she suggested I might instead look at reading difficulties or dyslexia, which was then very much under-researched.
Because of my family experience – my brother was severely dyslexic, and my father probably mildly so – that really chimed with me. When we were children, people told my mother that dyslexia didn’t exist. She’d be told: “Oh, he’s not very bright, just because you’ve got a bright daughter, you shouldn’t think he’s going to be the same.”
How much has our understanding of dyslexia improved since then – and what misconceptions are still lingering?
Commonly people think that dyslexia is a specific difficulty with reading which only affects reading and writing, meaning everything else is completely okay with that child. This accounts for why very clever children can be dyslexic. That’s what we thought historically, but that’s not always the case at all.
In fact, dyslexia is a problem that originates in our language system, in the ability to understand speech and to produce speech. For children with dyslexia, that part of the brain just doesn’t work in the same way. What we’re now finding is that about half of the children who go on to be dyslexic have significant difficulties both in understanding and in producing oral language.
Another common misconception around dyslexia is that it’s visual, and that it will be helped by coloured lenses or colour filters over text. We now know there are some children that have these problems with visual stress, but that’s not the same as dyslexia.
How are researchers and practitioners now rethinking reading disorders?
We’ve known for many years that reading disorders run in families. In recent years we’ve been studying children who are at ‘family risk’ of dyslexia from a very early stage in development before they develop reading problems. This gets us away from what used to be the case – research based on clinical samples of children with diagnosed dyslexia. When you identify the precursors of dyslexic in this way, you get a different picture of what we call ‘risk factors’.
Now we understand that dyslexia is not just a very specific difficulty with reading it becomes clear that we need to support children in a different way. If you give a traditional dyslexia intervention, it’s only going to target reading and neglect any underlying language difficulties. You might make some progress, but it won’t achieve as much as it could.
And how could policymakers rethink how we support children with reading disorders?
Currently, children in England have the phonics screening check in Year One at school. Why aren’t we thinking about what is the precursor of performance on that reading screening check? I think we need to screen children for spoken language at school entry, which is a really critical moment in a child’s development.
Screening language at school entry would provide data to help identify children who, without extra support, are likely going to need reading help later down the line. This is particularly relevant now schools are going to have extra scrutiny from Ofsted on provision for children with a special educational need or disability (SEND), many of whom will have needs around literacy.
Who do you hope will attend this webinar?
Speech and language therapists are key professionals in this field, and I hope I can inspire them to work more closely with schools to share expertise.
Anyone working in early years, whether that is health visitors or others, could definitely benefit from the session, and equally child psychologists and child psychiatrists should find it relevant.
And what do you want attendees to take from the webinar?
The main message I want to put forward is that reading is written language and you can’t do written language unless you can do spoken language. So there is a call to arms, for all those concerned with child development, for more focus on oral language.
This really matters because poor literacy can really catapult you towards mental health problems, poor school attendance, and being led down the wrong path in life. At the same time, it’s also really important to think more broadly about what success means, and alternative pathways in education.
Full details of the webinar can be found at https://www.acamh.org/event/rethinking-reading-disorders
