The Meaning of Headlines: 'alphabet soup'

The Meaning of Headlines: 'alphabet soup' - education

The Globe and Mail published an article on October 23, 2015, with the headline ‘Dyslexia: An alphabet soup of remedies.’ What does ‘alphabet soup’ mean?

Oxford Dictionaries defines ‘alphabet soup’ as ‘a confusing or confused mixture of things.’ The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as ‘a hodgpodge, especially of initials’ or a ‘bowl of alphabet soup.’ A bowl of alphabet soup was a soup with pasta noodles in the shape of alphabet letters – like chicken noodle soup, but with small letters floating in it.

The article describes dyslexia as a ‘learning difficulty’ that affects 20% of school-aged children in which ‘they will struggle to recognize the alphabet, write their names, pronounce words, or learn rhymes.’ Typical readers average tens of thousands of words that they know by sight, but people with dyslexia have about 300 known words. The article adds that dyslexia and learning difficulties don’t need to be lifelong if children are identified early and given interventions to address their learning needs.

Many intervention programs have been in schools for years, but there is little scientific evidence of their effectiveness. The article explains some recent studies and the range of ‘learning remedies’ – and adds that some don’t address the root cause. The article mentions the theories why dyslexia occurs, such as lack of word recognition, hand-eye disconnect, phonological deficit, limited strategies to ‘decode’ words, low literacy levels, and changed brain functioning. The article adds that remedial intervention strategies are left to individual schools to choose which methods to adopt. Professor Hale of the Centre for Brain Literacy at the University of Calgary in Canada said few schools were evaluating children early enough – they were evaluating children in the third, fourth, or fifth grade, because they were waiting to see if children with learning issues would eventually ‘catch up’ to the rest of the class.

Scorecard for The Globe and Mail headline is 100%. The article presents a confusing or confused range of reasons and causes for dyslexia, and a confusing range of interventions to address it – a veritable alphabet soup of ways to read the alphabet.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/dyslexia/article26962379/

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