A few days ago, data from a press conference held by the Ministry of Education showed that the illiteracy rate on the mainland has dropped to 2.67 percent. Literacy is so widespread that it gives the illusion that learning to read should not be a difficult task for everyone, but is that really the case?
Children's activities in Lijiaxiang Town Center Kindergarten in Changxing County, Zhejiang Province. Xinhua News Agency
Manifestations of "dyslexia"
At the end of the 19th century, the British Medical Journal recorded a case in which the boy Pesci, who had excellent intelligence and intact perceptual abilities, began to receive schooling from the age of 7, but until the age of 14 he still could not read smoothly and could only spell out monosyllabic words with great difficulty. Today we know this as typical developmental dyslexia, sometimes referred to as "dyslexia."
More than a hundred years later, the current understanding of developmental dyslexia is as follows: a congenital neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests itself as difficulty in accurately and/or fluently recognizing words, and the individual has a normal intelligence, living environment and education level, while there is no obvious impairment in hearing, vision and nervous system, but the reading performance is significantly lower than the same age level, in a difficult state.
Developmental dyslexia occurs at the word level. The principal, who has taught Percy for many years, said that if the teaching is completely oral, then Percy will be the smartest person in the school, that is, Percy's understanding of the language is intact.
The average person often can't distinguish between developmental dyslexia and dyslexia, in fact, they are very different, and even have a similar "anti-image relationship": people with developmental dyslexia have difficulty in word recognition but have no problem understanding meaning, and people with dyslexia can recognize words but cannot understand what they are reading.
Developmental dyslexia is an important factor in inducing learning disability in children, and although initially found in learners of pinyin characters, it is universal, with similar rates among learners of different script types, generally considered to be between 5% and 10%. Of course, because of the different attributes of the text, the specific manifestations of the obstacle will vary. Common manifestations of children with developmental dyslexia in the Chinese language are: literacy is lower than expected age and education level, do not know the words that have been learned, read incorrect words (such as "ashamed" as "jiàn ɡuǐ"), miss words, skip lines when reading, and make mistakes; Or even if you can read correctly, but it takes significantly longer than your peers, and you hesitate to pause more often. In addition, in addition to the aspect of "reading", some children are also accompanied by the problem of "writing", many of the words they have learned can not write at all, replaced by homophones (such as writing "Hanzi" as "dry son"), confusing the two Chinese characters in the word (such as dictation of "world" "shi" but written as "boundary"), writing wrong side (such as writing the right side of "deception" as next to the reverse text), and so on. Sometimes the child's behavior is confusing: he can fluently read a text aloud in front of the textbook, but he cannot complete it if he is asked to find a word that appears multiple times in the text (such as asking him to point out all the "medium" words).
The Yuhuang Guoxue Branch of Zixing Library in Hunan Province carried out educational practice activities. Xinhua News Agency
How dyslexia occurs
To understand the manifestations of children with developmental dyslexia, it is necessary to understand what processing process word reading goes through. Writing is the visual symbol system of the recorded language, and language is the auditory symbol system of phonetically combined (the natural sign language of the deaf is not discussed here, it is a special language). Reading is to convert written visual symbols into language code, which is the most critical part of word decoding.
Taking the reading of the word "mouth" as an example, "mouth" records a combination of phonology and meaning in the spoken language [kǒu + human or animal feeding organs], and the reader usually has to use the sound of kǒu to know through the sound that the glyph represents the meaning of the "eating organ", and the voice is the medium that connects the glyph and the spoken language system. If the glyph cannot be associated with the sound of the word, then for the child, the "mouth" is just a quadrilateral. Different characters take different ways in how glyphs relate to the sounds of words: for example, English records the smallest unit of speech in spoken language with the help of letters or string letters- phonemes, like the word right, r corresponds to one phoneme/r/, i corresponds to two phonemes/aɪ/, and ght corresponds to one phoneme/t/; Chinese characters, on the other hand, use a square glyph to record a unit of a single phoneme or multiple phonemes— a syllable, or more precisely, a syllable with a specific tone. No matter which way to connect the glyph with the glyph, the word learning is to remember the correspondence between the glyph and the glyph, that is, the shape-sound pairing relationship.
Since the fundamental task of text learning is to establish a shape-tone pairing relationship, once the shape-tone pairing fails, there will be reading problems. When an English reader reads right, if the corresponding phoneme of i is paired with /i/, the pronunciation of the word becomes /rit/, which is the manifestation of misprojection, and this error occurs because i can correspond to two phonemes. Obviously, the more complex the correspondence between glyphs and speech, the more difficult it is for the reader to establish a shape-tone pairing. In some pinyin characters, there is a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes, and the dyslexia of these characters will indeed improve the accuracy of word reading, but the problem of fluency still exists. Children with dyslexia pronounce "ashamed" as "jiàn ɡuǐ" because "shame" is similar to the "gradual" glyph, and the right side of "ashamed" is pronounced "ɡuǐ", indicating that the near-shaped characters and the sound side of chinese characters will cause children to have a morphological and phonetic pairing error; The mistake of "dry" is that it is possible to only establish a pairing of "drought" with hàn; Confusion between "world" and "boundary" indicates that they cannot correspond the two units in the compound word "world" to their respective syllables, and establish independent shape and sound pairings; Being able to read the text fluently but not being able to recognize the "medium" that appears many times in the text indicates that the child does not recognize the correspondence between the spoken word and the written word, which is atypical, mainly reflecting the child's phonological memory of the text, rather than the reading of the speech by the glyph. As for the fluency problem, it is because the shape and tone pairing is not firmly established, so it takes more time to extract the speech that is not clear enough in the memory to see the glyph.
The reasons why shape and tone pairing cannot be successful are complex. Attribution from "shape" must be related to vision, and the explanations under this perspective include visual perception defects, visual attention defects, etc.; Explanations starting from "sound" include auditory perception defects, speech perception defects, speech defects, etc.; There is also an explanation from the perspective of the combination of "shape" and "sound", and it is believed that the failure of shape and tone pairing to achieve automation is the source of the problem of fluency. Reading is a complex behavior, involving many factors and processes, and people with developmental dyslexia will not be homogeneous within themselves, and the above explanations may point to different subclasses.
The third kindergarten of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, children participate in sharing activities. Xinhua News Agency
Common misconceptions
The first misunderstanding is that poor literacy and writing performance is caused by children's weak motivation to learn, a lack of serious attitude or laziness. This is a very common misconception that children with developmental dyslexia are often re-victimized by the environment because they are not understood by their parents or teachers. Developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that may be much easier to understand in the context of neurodiversity.
The second misunderstanding has a certain correlation with the first, and people who hold the first view naturally do not associate dyslexia with heredity. Developmental dyslexia has a family genetic basis, and if parents have dyslexia, their children will also have 1/4 to 1/2 of them; Conversely, if the child is diagnosed, then 1/3 to 1/2 of the parents of these children will also be diagnosed.
The third misconception is that smart children cannot be developing dyslexia. Many people with print disabilities have very high IQs, including Einstein and Jobs, and there are people with print disabilities in different professions such as writers, clinicians, researchers, politicians, etc.
The fourth myth is that there are gender differences in the incidence of developmental dyslexia, which is much higher in men than in women. Studies have shown that the incidence of dyslexia in boys worldwide is 4 to 6 times higher than that of girls, but subsequent gender-specific surveys have found no significant difference in the incidence of men and women, and this bias comes from the fact that schools will send more boys to the test because boys are more naughty, which makes it easy for teachers to think that they have behavioral problems; Instead, girls are quiet and polite, and their reading problems are covered up and are not easily noticed by teachers, especially in the lower grades of primary school.
How to treat children with developmental dyslexia properly
Dyslexia is persistent, but people with print disabilities can improve well with appropriate interventions. It is important to identify early and help as early as possible. Early childhood language performance can largely predict reading risk. At least half of children with developmental language impairment develop dyslexia after school, and these children do not have obvious intellectual and audiovisual deficits, but have late speech, simple words spoken, and difficulty finding words in the preschool stages. Preschool recognition and intervention is very necessary, because children need to make up less knowledge at this stage than after schooling, and the assessment test of preschool ability is more simple, if a certain intervention can be implemented at this stage, it can greatly reduce the overt occurrence of dyslexia and prevent the challenge of major reading problems after enrollment.
There are different subclasses of dyslexia within it, and the severity of individuals varies, so specific interventions vary from person to person. Overall, the earlier the diagnosis and intervention, the better, the nervous system of the brain is plastic, and the younger the age, the greater the plasticity; Interventions must be sought from professional teachers who know how to develop intervention plans based on the individualized performance of children and which interventions have been scientifically validated; Intensive, intensive instruction is essential, and biologically speaking, training must be done in sufficient quantities to complete the remodeling of the nervous system.
So far, the research results for children with Chinese dyslexia are not too few, but they have not yet formed a theoretical system that fits the attributes of Chinese characters themselves; On the other hand, the work done on the application of screening, diagnosis, evaluation, intervention and other applications is very limited, and it is urgent to increase the investment of human and material resources. Only by connecting theory and application, and the two go hand in hand, can more people truly understand developmental dyslexia, better speak up for these children, and strive for equal opportunities for development.
(Author: Liang Dandan, Professor, College of Literature, Nanjing Normal University)
(Original title: Developmental Dyslexia Demystified)