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.
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