The "Matthew Effect" in reading (loosely the rich get richer, the poor get poorer) is the idea that individual who find it hard to read are likely to read less over time, resulting in poor levels of reading fluency (less practice) and lower vocabularies.
The link below is one of the classic papers from Cunningham and Stanovich, What Reading Does for the Mind. In the figure below, look at the differences in challenging vocabulary among the different types of material - printed text / books, newspapers / magazines, and children's books. But even among college educated students, spoken language is much simpler - really at the level of the preschool book!
Well, it's easy to understand why many young dyslexics gravitate away from reading and succumb to the Matthew Effect. They may find other things they do well, and decide that reading is just not for them. But if that choice is made early on and not challenged, it can also limit their future choices and put them on a track of verbal inferiority and embarrassment.
In our recent review of highly gifted dyslexics, we found a striking exception to the Matthew effect. In fact, when the I.Q scores of our gifted dyslexics (n = 15) were averaged, we found a surprisingly high distribution of verbal scores. Gifted dyslexics defy the Matthew Effect. When we looked closer at these students, too, we found that many of these students were in fact avid readers - although some admittedly were getting their rich verbal fare through books on tape. One Mom told us wearily, "He's almost addicted to having me read books to him!" Bravo for her!
I guess our takehome point is that it's essential to look for and foster gifted dyslexics' surprising verbal strengths - and parents, professionals, and the students themselves should not mistake the primary perceptual disorder of dyslexic (problems processing the sounds and sights of words) for a primary problem in language in general. It is no accident that there's a long list of dyslexics who go on to become famous writers.
What Reading Does for the Mind
Famous People with the Gift of Dyslexia
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4 comments:
Do you think it is just "gifted dyslexics" or is it also true for non-gifted dyslexic kids who are read to, encouraged to develop their oral (expressive & receptive) vocabularies, and otherwise get the amount of info shovelled into their brains ?
In other words, somewhere around 3rd grade the task goes from "learning to read" to "reading to learn". Kids with slow rates of reading can compensate by getting information in other ways.
I would urge all parents of kids with reading delays (dyslexia or whatever) to make use of Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic. The machines are easily handled by kids as young as 3rd grade and the recorded materials are free.
What I have noticed is a knock-on effect, so to speak. Kids who are well-remediated for the primary problem (in other words, have good decoding and word-attack skills) but still have a low reading speed, find that listening and reading simultanously makes the act of reading more enjoyable, more rewarding.
Another thing I've noticed is relative to textbooks. One young dyslexic I know is better able to use her textbook for test preparation--somehow, the reading while listening lets her find relevant passages later, more easily. In other words, when she is reviewing, she has a mental picture of where the relevant passages are--something that was difficult heretofore.
My surmise is that she has enough working memory space (freed up by the listening+reading) to also recall location clues like the page number, the illustrations on the page, or the notations she might have made.
Great comments, thank you.
Well, you're right. We don't think it's a phenomenon limited to gifted dyslexics. All parents should be encouraged to read books aloud to their kids - and develop a culture of words (enjoy discovering new words, appreciate their color and drama, their sound, etc.) if the effort of reading is too much while they're learning. RFBD is a tremendous resources - and they will also record books if they aren't available in their catalogue.
Many dyslexic kids may get into a spiral avoiding reading because they aren't good at it, then they become less efficient compared to their peers because they're not doing it...but if parents can support the enjoyment of verbal material by reading together or books on tape - then they will be perfectly primed to become recreational readers when the routine of reading becomes easier.
As the parent of a gifted dyslexic, I am trying to read the "small print" on the graph; were these WISC-III or WISC-IV subtests?
Sorry the print is so small. When we get a chance, we'll post the graphs in a large size on the dyslexia pages at http://mislabeledchild.com.
We've been undergoing a painful transition to DSL (our cable crashed) WISC III. We've only had a handful of kids come through with the WISC IV so far - those kids are usually younger.
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