There's a huge fuss going on about an article Graham Stringer MP wrote for "Manchester Confidential"
Put simply, Stringer's claim is that there is no such thing as dyslexia, and that teaching people to read using what he says is the right method will make the perceived problem go away.
Naturally, such a blunt statement has caused much rage, as can be seen from the hundreds of comments on the web page mentioned above.
I think he has gone a long way too far in what he says, and I think the truth is...
- There are a number of people who do actually have the real problem that is dyslexia.
- There are a number of people who have not learned to read properly, who have been classified as dyslexic.
I am not going to say anything about how large the numbers in the two cases are. I do have an opinion about this, but it's only an opinion.
The interesting part of the whole thing, to me, is the discussion of how children learn to read. There has been a "religious war" about this going on for many years, that is unlikely to end soon. There are endless methods described, and the words phonics, analytical and synthetic appear in many of them.
Oversimplifying, there is a method called "synthetic phonics" which involves teaching a child the sounds each letter makes, and how to put the sounds together to find out what each word is. It really doesn't need a fancy name. It's what my Mum and Dad did when I was somewhere between 3 and 4 years old. By the time I started school, I had four library tickets, and had read hundreds of books, including a lot from the adult section of the library. Mum and Dad got in a lot of trouble with the school, for having taught me themselves, but I will be grateful for the rest of my life. I think that is the only sensible way to teach reading. The idiocy of teaching whole words before the letters (called analytical phonics, I believe), and other crazy methods, should be abandoned in favour of the simple, obvious, effective way of doing it.
Stringer has been accused of "publicity seeking" and worse. He seems mainly to be guilty of treating complex issues in oversimplified terms. I just hope that when the fuss is over, more parents get in first, and teach their pre-school children how the letters work, so they can already read well before schools get the chance to mess them up. It is just possible that might reduce the number of children who don't have dyslexia but can't read because they were taught using a stupid method. That would be good, and parents should do all they can for their children, not leave it to the schools to do it all.
