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Using the landmark case of Mr. and Mrs. Doe vs Cape Elizabeth School System as its narrative spine, Blame It On Gutenberg explores the topic from the often-conflicting perspectives of students and parents, researchers in their high-tech brain labs, and school administrators juggling limited resources.

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Critics Respond to Calkins' Position Statement about Science of Reading - International Dyslexia Association

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From the Examiner Editorial Board

Just before Thanksgiving, Columbia University's Teachers College Reading & Writing Project posted Lucy Calkins' seven-page position statement in response to "phonics-centric people" titled, " No One Gets to Own the Term, 'The Science of Reading.'" Even with the holiday around the corner, her statement attracted considerable attention, and despite a few concessions, she received some pointed criticism. We applaud efforts to search for common ground in reading instruction, but the critiques are significant. The links below-from Education Week, Margaret Goldberg, Pamela Snow, and Mark Seidenberg-will help busy readers catch up on this development and ponder some of the criticism.

Education Week/Teacher: "Lucy Calkins, Creator of Reading Workshop, Responds to 'Phonics-Centric People.'" This article provides a good overview and helpful context.

Right to Read Project: "Dear Lucy." Margaret Goldberg-who attended the Teachers College Reading and Writing Program Foundational Skills Institute in 2016-directly challenges Calkins' assertion that three-cueing is just an assessment system and isn't used as an instructional strategy. Goldberg also shares her own experience diving into reading science and finding her world "upended." She encourages Calkins to help bring classroom practices across the country closer to reading science.

1. The Snow Report: "Running with the Hare and Hunting with the Hound. My Response to Lucy Calkins' 'Science of Reading' Essay." Pamela Snow argues in her blog that Calkins resorts to several straw-man arguments in her position statement and that her concessions do not go far enough. Snow concludes, "...on every page, Calkins' true Whole Language/Balanced Literacy biases seep through, revealing that though she wants to be on the right side of history, she is running with the hare and hunting with the hound. However, that is not how science works."

2. Reading Matters: "This Is Why We Don't Have Better Readers: Response to Lucy Calkins." In his blog, Mark Seidenberg asserts that Calkins is trying to "protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers." His critique offers a larger historical context and blames Calkins and the educational establishment for failings such as the 2019 NAEP scores. Seidenberg acknowledges that Calkins' recognition of dyslexia is a positive step, but argues that her "attempt to wrap her work in the mantle of science fails because she has yet to absorb basic findings that contradict the tenets of her approach." He predicts that Calkins and other curriculum authors and publishers will follow her lead and claim that their products are compatible with the science of reading.

Copyright © 2019 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Opinions expressed in The Examiner and/or via links do not necessarily reflect those of IDA.

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Critics Respond to Calkins' Position Statement about Science of Reading - International Dyslexia Association

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Share This: From the Examiner Editorial Board Just before Thanksgiving, Columbia University's Teachers College Reading & Writing Project posted Lucy Calkins' seven-page position statement in response to "phonics-centric people" titled, " No One Gets to Own the Term, 'The Science of Reading.'" Even with the holiday around the corner, her statement attracted considerable attention, and despite a few concessions, she received some pointed criticism.

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As a child, Roberto Olivardia didn't enjoy reading. Processing the words on a page fatigued him. But Olivardia - now a psychologist at McLean Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School - never considered that he might have dyslexia. He remembers watching an episode of the ABC Afterschool Specials series about a boy with dyslexia who wrote words backwards. Since Olivardia's writing looked normal, he thought "that's not me.

Decades later, Olivardia witnessed his six-year-old son experiencing a similar fatigue. Only the six-year-old's was worse. "His vocabulary was off the charts, it was so extensive," Olivardia recalls, "but with reading, there was a real difference between him and other kids." Only after his son's diagnosis of dyslexia did Olivardia become aware of the condition's complexities: how misunderstood it is among parents, teachers, and doctors; how it manifests in myriad ways; and how a diagnosis can change everything.

Yet getting that diagnosis is not always easy because physicians and scientists are still putting together the many puzzle pieces of dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that affects an estimated 7 to 10 percent of the population. The condition is marked by a person's difficulty to accurately and fluently read words and to accurately decode and spell words.

Although the causes for dyslexia are complex, a main factor is a person's difficulty with phonological and phonemic awareness; that is, their ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words, which sets the stage for decoding, blending, and, ultimately, reading words. Imagine, for example, being presented a word from a language other than your native language, written using symbols or an alphabet associated with that language. It may be possible to get a sense of the sounds in the word - but remembering all of them and blending them together could be hard. Each letter would need to be deciphered, and their sounds stitched together to form a word. It's a process that can take time.

Doctors in Europe began talking about dyslexia in the nineteenth century - around the time compulsory schooling became more common. They described a curious paradox: cases of individuals who, despite being otherwise healthy, had trouble reading. In 1896 in the British Medical Journal, physician William Pringle Morgan wrote about a 14-year-old patient who he described as a bright and intelligent boy whose "great difficulty has always been ... [an] inability to learn to read."

In the ensuing decades, various hypotheses for the causes came and went. It wasn't laziness. It wasn't a vision problem. It wasn't the result of an infection. Some scientists began to suspect structural differences in the brain.

Searching for dyslexia clues in the brain is not simple. In part, that's because there isn't a single region of the brain devoted to reading. In the course of human history, reading is a relatively recent innovation. Unlike with spoken language, humans haven't evolved a natural capacity for learning to read through exposure. Instead, learning to read requires that different areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes - including vision and sound perception - be retrained to work together to recognize and interpret written words. If scientists wanted to pinpoint the basis of dyslexia, they would need to explore the many brain regions involved in reading, as well as the neural pathways connecting them.

How does the brain learn to read? This short video explains.

Another hurdle? "It's not really a disease," says Albert Galaburda , the Emily Fisher Landau Professor of Neurology, Emeritus, at HMS. When Galaburda began searching for brain evidence of dyslexia back in the 1970s, advanced imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were not yet available; instead, researchers studied postmortem brains. And since people didn't typically die of dyslexia, it was rare to find a donated brain linked to a recorded case of the condition.

In 1979, Galaburda found an exception: a donated brain from a young man who had fallen through an elevator shaft to his death because his dyslexia prevented him from reading a cautionary sign. In one of the first studies exploring anatomical brain differences in people with dyslexia, published in Annals of Neurology in 1979, Galaburda and a colleague highlighted some interesting patterns that he would later also find in brains of other dyslexic people, including unusual symmetry between the two hemispheres and anomalies in the development of the cortex. Along with his mentor, Norman Geschwind, MD '51, Galaburda's work raised myriad associations for researchers to test, such as links between dyslexia and autoimmune disorders or levels of sex hormones.

"Geschwind and Galaburda were among the first ones thinking about a multifactorial model - looking at all the different factors that sort of work together to cause atypical reading development," says Nadine Gaab, an associate professor of pediatrics at HMS and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Clues found in the developing brain

By the time Gaab began her own research into dyslexia in 2007, new neuroimaging techniques were available for researchers to examine the brains of children living with dyslexia or those who had a familial risk for the condition - that is, a biological parent or sibling with dyslexia. At that point, "we knew a lot about how the brain of a person with dyslexia differed in activation patterns and different tasks," Galaburda says. But an important question remained: Did dyslexia cause these differences, or did these differences cause dyslexia?

Gaab focused on answering this question. An MIT research group she was a part of focused its study on one white matter tract called the arcuate fasciculus, or the "the arc," which connects key brain areas involved in reading: those related to vision and sound processing at the back of the brain and the inferior frontal gyrus, an area responsible for comprehension and meaning. In a subsequent longitudinal study in which the brains of kindergartners were scanned, Gaab and colleagues demonstrated that children who had lower phonological processing skills, a risk factor for dyslexia, also had smaller arcs.

Nadine Gaab

After identifying that link, Gaab and colleagues set out to learn when these differences emerge. They compared brain scans from children with a familial risk for dyslexia with those from children without the familial risk and found that children at risk for the condition showed differences in the arc even before beginning formal schooling. Moreover, the rate of the structure's development was slower among those who later developed poor reading skills regardless of familial risk. To the researchers, this suggested that some children began kindergarten with brains that were less well equipped for learning to read.

To explore how early these differences emerged, the researchers examined the brains of participants who had thus far been largely neglected in dyslexia studies: babies. Their initial study, published in Cerebral Cortex in 2017, found that infants of parents who had struggled with reading showed alterations the arc compared to infants of parents who hadn't struggled to read. In subsequent studies, they observed a link between these alterations and phonological processing and oral language skills in kindergarten. They also found that the microstructure of the arc can be shaped by lifestyle factors, such as how early and often a child is read to.

We now know that some kids who step into kindergarten on their first day, with their little backpacks, have a heightened risk for struggling with learning to read.

While the arc is only one of several brain areas exhibiting differences in people with dyslexia, Gaab's findings have provided an impetus for action. In addition to linking risk factors for dyslexia to specific parts of the brain, her work shows that some of these risks can be inherited. And the findings indicate that while genetics matter, environment can matter, too. Perhaps more important, they suggest that risk factors for dyslexia exist early - very early. "We now know that some kids who step into kindergarten on their first day, with their little backpacks, have a heightened risk for struggling with learning to read," Gaab says. "That's a really important distinction in terms of policy and how early we should find these kids and intervene."

The value of early intervention

Despite so many children already at risk before starting school, U.S. school systems tend to identify children with dyslexia only after it's clear that something is wrong - at around nine or ten years old. Gaab, who describes herself as a "translational neuroscientist," has become a tireless proponent of early intervention. She advocated for a new Massachusetts law that was signed by the governor in 2018, requiring screening for dyslexia for children in kindergarten. And she's been developing a tablet-based tool that can be used to screen children for reading problems as early as age four. This latter tool is especially useful because fMRI data, while good for exploring overall patterns of brain differences between groups, is impractical in educational contexts and does not have the sensitivity and specificity necessary to identify at-risk children.

Gaab hopes that pediatricians - who often screen for autism and ADHD - will adopt dyslexia risk screening, too. "We embrace preventive medicine; we get mammograms and checkups to identify risk factors and try to address them so that we don't get sick," she says. "That's the same idea with dyslexia, to find at-risk kids early and intervene early, so that they never develop problems with reading. We call it preventive education."

Dyslexia itself is not hazardous to anyone's health. It really is the fact that they're not being identified, they're not being diagnosed, and they're not getting the services that they need.

Proper early identification is key, adds Gaab, because studies indicate that 50 to 90 percent of at-risk readers can reach average levels of performance with targeted instruction, and that interventions are more effective in kindergarten and first grade than later on.

According to Olivardia, children who are never identified, or who live in communities without access to these interventions, might get lumped into generic remedial reading classes. But if their instruction isn't tailored to dyslexia, "it's as if you don't understand the language someone is speaking, so they just speak louder," he says. "You're like, that doesn't help me at all."

Early intervention does more than help get reading levels on track. Children with dyslexia are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. But that's not due to differences in their brains; it's because in our society, literacy is key to academic and workplace success. "Dyslexia itself is not hazardous to anyone's health," says Olivardia, whose private psychotherapy practice specializes in treating children with learning disabilities. "It really is the fact that they're not being identified, they're not being diagnosed, and they're not getting the services that they need."

Education provides perspective

Olivardia understands the importance of reframing dyslexia for his patients. He talks to them about the many successful people who are thought to have had dyslexia - from Einstein to Picasso to British business magnate Richard Branson - and stresses his own observations that people with dyslexia exhibit above-average creativity and entrepreneurial skills. Research backs this up: A 2009 study in found a prevalence of dyslexia three times higher among entrepreneurs than people in the general population, while a higher prevalence of dyslexia has also been identified among students who pursue art or engineering. Other research points to a superior ability to connect unusual combinations of ideas among people with dyslexia.

Olivardia also draws from his experience parenting a child with dyslexia. Following his son's diagnosis, they practiced role-playing conversations with teachers and peers about the learning disability. One day, a few weeks after diagnosis, Olivardia's son was given lyrics to read in music class, but his dyslexia was so severe at that point that he couldn't read the words at all.

Olivardia's son asked a classmate to sit and sing along with him. The girl, confused, asked him why he couldn't read. Instead of shrinking away, he calmly explained that his brain was just different - and pointed out that Tom Cruise has the same thing. "She was like, oh, OK, and that was it," Olivardia says. "And he sat next to her. And when I picked him up, he said, 'Dad, it was a great day.'"

"There's a lot of hope in a label and a name," Olivardia adds. "It gives parents, teachers, and doctors the opportunity to emphasize that these kids' brains are wired differently - but that different does not mean they are defective."

Molly McDonough is the associate editor of Harvard Medicine
Images: John Soares (Olivardia); courtesy of Anna Olivella and the Harvard Brain Science Initiative (Gaab)

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Research on dyslexia is identifying the many factors - neural to societal - that are linked to the condition

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As a research lab, we do not provide clinical care, such as screening and diagnosis of dyslexia or other language-based learning disabilities. We acknowledge the importance of screening and early intervention and have provided helpful screening tools and advice.

If you are interested in presentations related to reading development, dyslexia, or screening for early literacy milestones, please visit our Events page.

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Screening for Reading Impairments - Gaab Lab

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As a research lab, we do not provide clinical care, such as screening and diagnosis of dyslexia or other language-based learning disabilities. We acknowledge the importance of screening and early intervention and have provided helpful screening tools and advice. If you are interested in presentations related to reading development, dyslexia, or screening for early literacy milestones, please visit our Events page.

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S2 E8: Dyslexia Facts, Myths and Strategies with Dr. Jack Fletcher

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S2 E8: Dyslexia Facts, Myths and Strategies with Dr. Jack Fletcher

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Kate chats with Dr. Jack Fletcher this week, unpacking all things dyslexia: Risk factors and prevention, dyslexia vs dysteachia, instructional tips, wait-to-fail, and dyslexia myths and misconceptions.

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Abstract

We address defining and identifying students with dyslexia within the context of multi-tier systems of support (MTSS). We review proposed definitions of dyslexia, evidence for proposed definitional attributes, and emphasize the role of instructional response in identifying students with dyslexia. We identify dyslexia as individuals with specific deficits in reading and spelling single words combined with inadequate response to evidence-based instruction. We propose a hybrid identification process in which assessment is utilized within school-wide MTSS allowing for integration of routinely collected progress monitoring data as well integrating with more formal diagnostic measures. This proposed "hybrid" method demonstrates strong evidence for valid decision-making and directly informs instruction. We close proposing a revised definition of dyslexia that incorporates these elements.

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Funding

This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and by grants R324A230138 and R324A200209 from the National Center for Special Education Research in the Institute of Education Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Special Education Research, or the Institute of Education Sciences.

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1. Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Sharon Vaughn & Nathan Clemens

2. Department of Psychology, Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics (TIMES), The University of Houston, 4849 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Ste. 373, Houston, TX, USA

Jeremy Miciak & Jack M. Fletcher

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Correspondence to Jeremy Miciak.

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Vaughn, S., Miciak, J., Clemens, N. et al. The critical role of instructional response in defining and identifying students with dyslexia: a case for updating existing definitions. Ann. of Dyslexia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-024-00303-0
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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The critical role of instructional response in defining and identifying students with dyslexia: a case for updating existing definitions - Annals of Dyslexia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We address defining and identifying students with dyslexia within the context of multi-tier systems of support (MTSS). We review proposed definitions of dyslexia, evidence for proposed definitional attributes, and emphasize the role of instructional response in identifying students with dyslexia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

The International Dyslexia Association definition of dyslexia was updated 20 years ago and has been referenced frequently in research and practice. In this paper, researchers from the Florida Center for Reading Research consider the components of the definition and make recommendations for revisions. These include recognizing the persistence of word-reading, decoding, and spelling difficulties, acknowledging the multifactorial causal basis of dyslexia, clarifying exclusionary factors, and denoting comorbidity with other developmental disorders. It is also suggested that the academic and psychosocial consequences of dyslexia be highlighted to reinforce a preventive service delivery model. Lastly, the inclusion of dyslexia within a specific learning disability category is supported.

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Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University, 2010 Levy Avenue, Suite 100, Tallahassee, FL, 32310, USA

Hugh W. Catts, Nicole Patton Terry, Christopher J. Lonigan, Donald L. Compton, Richard K. Wagner, Laura M. Steacy, Kelly Farquharson & Yaacov Petscher

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Catts, H.W., Terry, N.P., Lonigan, C.J. et al. Revisiting the definition of dyslexia. Ann. of Dyslexia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-023-00295-3
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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Revisiting the definition of dyslexia - Annals of Dyslexia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The International Dyslexia Association definition of dyslexia was updated 20 years ago and has been referenced frequently in research and practice. In this paper, researchers from the Florida Center for Reading Research consider the components of the definition and make recommendations for revisions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Towards a dynamic, comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia

Abstract

Here we build from the central strength of the existing definition of dyslexia-its emphasis on neurobiological origins-and proffer a set of seven core principles for a new, more comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia. These principles derive from two major research directions: (1) the still evolving history of attempts to explain dyslexia, including in varied writing systems; and (2) the study of the reading brain circuit, its development, and its genetic and environmental influences. What emerges from connecting these two directions is a dynamic conceptualization of dyslexia that incorporates the extensive research on the heterogeneity of dyslexia and the interdependent contributions of multiple biological and socio-cultural risk and preventive factors. A new definition of dyslexia, therefore, needs to transcend both past unitary characterizations and past assumptions based largely on the English orthography. Such a conceptualization references the ways that different languages interact with the reading brain circuit to produce different sources of reading failure. Similarly, the characteristics and consequences of dyslexia that have been considered as secondary sequela (e.g., reduced reading comprehension, social-emotional issues) should be part of a more comprehensive narrative. Of critical importance, any definition of dyslexia should clarify persisting misconceptions that associate dyslexia with a lack of intelligence, potential to learn, or talents. Thus, the overall purpose of such a definition should serve as an instrument of knowledge and an enduring reason for pursuing growth in reading for the individual, the educator, and the public.

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Not unlike Emily Dickinson's famous line, "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant; Success in Circuit lies" (Dickinson, 1890, p. 506), in this paper we will approach the need for a new definition of dyslexia circuitously through two directions that intersect in a "circuit" Dickinson never anticipated. First, we will examine the insight-rich history of attempts to understand dyslexia over the last century; and second, we will connect this history to our current, evolving understanding of the reading brain circuit. Together, these different slants of knowledge provide the basis for a more comprehensive, dynamic conceptualization of dyslexia that reflects its inherent, brain-based heterogeneity and the complex impact of external, socio-emotional, and demographic variables on reading failure and reading achievement.

A history of dyslexia: "tell all the truth, but tell it slant"

Anyone who hopes to understand dyslexia through the history of its research may be flummoxed at the outset. There are few more convoluted historical records than that for dyslexia with its multiple names, definitions, and differing explanations of its underlying cognitive mechanisms. Yet, each of these names and explanations offers an insight into a given epoch's understanding of reading and reading challenges. Just as Alberto Manguel ( 2014) chose to call his memorable book A History of Reading to emphasize that such a history can be told in many ways, we wish to follow his example here for the same reasons. In this way we dismiss no past research perspective for its narrower lens at that time, nor do we attempt to be inclusive in such a brief space. Rather, not unlike the story of the blind men and the elephant, we hope to show how a selected, cumulative history of the varied hypotheses unexpectedly contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of what connotes dyslexia in different individuals.

Visual and perceptual hypotheses

The fact that few phenomena have been given more differing names and more causal explanations over the last century than dyslexia has good, important reasons that will emerge later. The first use of the term " dyslexia" (derived from the Latin morpheme dys for 'difficult' and the Greek root lexis for 'word') by German ophthalmologist Berlin was chosen to denote difficulties with words by various adult patients. Later in the nineteenth century, two physicians, Pringle Morgan ( 1896) and Hinshelwood, used another term, word-blindness (derived from "Wort-Blindheit" by German ophthalmologist, Kussmaul, 1878) to describe an unexpected failure in children to develop reading based on an inability to see words correctly. Thus, the first causal explanations begin in the visual system, an explanation that will come in and out of this history and resurface in a more nuanced way most recently by Yeatman (e.g., White et al., 2019).

Neurologist Orton ( 1928) conducted some of the most influential dyslexia research during the early twentieth century and promptly replaced the term word blindness with the term strephosymbolia. Like others to come, Orton wished to depict what he considered to be a different underlying locus of reading failure: i.e., lateralization confusions between the brain's two hemispheres that caused difficulties in processing symbols. In a similar vein, various neurologists and neuroscientists over time emphasized the contributions of other brain regions to indicate the role that areas like the limbic system, cerebellum (Stoodley & Schmahmann, 2009), and thalamus (Llinas, 1993) can play in visual representation, memory, and the precise timing of component parts (Wolf, 1991; Wolff, 1993) needed during reading. Again, new names like amnesia visualis verbalis for key memory issues and dyschronia for timing issues (Llinas, 1993) reflected the hypotheses of the researcher about what was most disruptive to the acquisition of reading in dyslexia.

Although disruptions in the visual system continued to be the predominant explanations in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century (Vellutino, 1979), other sensory systems were implicated in auditory processing disorders, as discussed early on by Lucy Fildes ( 1921) and evolved over time in several directions. For example, by mid-century, multi-modality (Blank & Bridger, 1964) explanations focused more attention on the connections between and among the visual and auditory systems, as well as to cognitive processes that governed these connections-like the ability to hold information in working memory and sequence verbal information. This research was the precursor for later important work on the role of executive functions in reading (e.g., Cirino et al., 2019; Kim, 2023; Swanson & Kong, 2018). During the 1970s, one of the most heatedly debated hypotheses, the temporal processing disorder, was rooted in speech and language pathology research and focused on the temporal, acoustic dimensions of auditory perception of the phoneme (Tallal & Piercy, 1973).

Phonological-based hypotheses

The most critical opponents of the latter view emerged from the field of psycholinguistics and would change the history of dyslexia. The explosion of work on the role of phonological processes in reading and in dyslexia emerged from early studies by Bond and Dykstra ( 1967) and from a program of research by psycholinguists working in Bell Laboratories and later Haskins Laboratories (e.g., Kavanaugh & Mattingly, 1972; Liberman et al., 1989; Liberman & Shankweiler, 1979; Malins et al., 2016). The hypothesis was that a failure within language systems, specifically phonological processes involved in the representation of phonemes and the developing meta-awareness of them, was the major linguistic source of disruption in dyslexia. This view, the phonological-core deficit hypothesis, eclipsed previous emphases on perceptual deficit hypotheses that involved visual and/or auditory systems (Vellutino, 1979) and became a dominant perspective till the present.

The investigations into the relationship between the phonological components of language and reading yielded significant advances in our understanding of the important role of phonemic awareness (PA) in learning the alphabetic principle in reading, as well as its utility in the early identification of reading difficulties and the teaching of beginning reading (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Ramus, 2003; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020; Torgesen et al., 1999; Washington & Seidenberg, 2021). The importance of phoneme-level representation in beginning reading is intrinsically connected to the alphabetic nature of the English writing system. More specifically, the ability to map the individual distinctive sounds of spoken English (i.e., phonemes) to the symbols (i.e., graphemes) representing these sounds is critical in the development of decoding and spelling. Phonemic awareness was considered such a crucial skill that it was identified by the National Reading Panel Report (NICHD, 2000) as one of five essential elements of effective reading instruction and is included in the goals of most interventions in dyslexia. Stretching across five decades to the present, there have been more scientific papers on this hypothesis than for any other unitary hypothesis into the causes of dyslexia (e.g., Torgesen, 2018; Wagner et al., 2019).

Neurological hypotheses

Although few today dispute the importance of phonological processes in reading and reading failure, a parallel direction of research from neurology and the cognitive neurosciences emphasized the presence of other areas of cognitive weakness causing or contributing to dyslexia symptoms. Perhaps the most influential of these hypotheses originated with the seminal research by behavioral neurologist Norman Geschwind on the "Disconnexion Syndrome in Animals and Man" (Geschwind, 1965). Before cognitive sciences became their own area of study, Geschwind used basic models of the brain to depict what caused acquired reading failure or alexia that resulted from discrete areas of stroke or brain injury. He used these models to convey the then novel hypothesis that different disconnections among the varied reading-related areas (e.g., vision and language regions within and between the two hemispheres) could underlie different forms of reading failure, as evident in alexia with and without agraphia.

Tucked within this overarching view of adult alexia is one of the less known aspects of developmental dyslexia's history. With these models as context, Geschwind hypothesized that color naming, which requires the connection of the visual and language systems in order to retrieve a name for abstract symbols like color, would be a powerful predictor of dyslexia in children. Color naming, he speculated, would expose the inability to connect the key reading systems to retrieve a name and thus predict dyslexia. Although by itself this hypothesis proved incorrect, his student, pediatric neurologist Denckla, and neuropsychologist Rudel went on to find that the speed of connecting these systems in naming various symbols did, in fact, predict dyslexia (Denckla & Rudel, 1976).

This was the beginning of two related but diverging directions of research spawned by the prolific work of Geschwind and his students, particularly Denckla and Galaburda.

Denckla pursued more cognitive-behavioral differences that could explain the predictive capacity of naming speed-that is, the rapidity of retrieval for visually presented symbols-for individuals with dyslexia. Investigating what Denckla and Rudel termed Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), Denckla and her student Wolf (Wolf, 1991; Wolf & Denckla, 2005), along with Bowers (Wolf & Bowers, 1999; Wolf & Bowers, 2000a), and multiple other researchers (see reviews in Norton & Wolf, 2012; McWeeny et al., 2022) found extensive evidence for a "second deficit" in RAN or naming speed in individuals with dyslexia. Despite efforts to explain this as a phonological-based weakness, Wolf and Bowers (Wolf & Bowers, 1999; Wolf & Bowers, 2000a) demonstrated that there are children with RAN issues without PA involvement, as well as children with PA differences only. Most importantly, the most severely impaired children possessed both RAN and PA issues, among other challenges. Similar studies proliferated: e.g., using taxonomic classification methods, O'Brien et al. ( 2012) found analogous subtypes in a sample of 600 children. Extensive cross-linguistic research from various writing systems replicated the presence of an independent RAN weakness that was more predictive than PA in more transparent languages (Di Filippo et al., 2005; Ibrahim, 2015; Katzir et al., 2004; Share, 2008; Spencer & Hanley, 2003; Torppa et al., 2012; Traficante, 2023) and in other orthographies like Chinese (Tan et al., 2005).

There is an important, insufficiently understood historical caveat. Wolf and Bowers (Wolf & Bowers, 1999; Wolf & Bowers, 2000b) first used the term "Double-Deficit Hypothesis" to include, but go beyond, unitary phoneme-based hypotheses. However, from the outset they conceptualized the three most common subtypes as placeholders for research into the various possible sources of disruption underlying RAN, as well as into multiple other vulnerabilities beyond RAN and phonology. The RAN and later RAS (Rapid Alternating Stimulus) tasks (Wolf & Denckla, 2005) were conceptualized then and now as assessing the speed with which various visual and language processes are connected, any one or more of which can disrupt the rapidity of retrieval (Wolf & Obregón, 1992). In this view, therefore, naming speed involves a mini-circuit that includes many of the same cognitive and linguistic processes in the larger reading circuit. This is the underlying basis of its predictive capacities. A RAN deficit is thus an index of various possible sources of disruption, not the actual disruptor.

Neurobiological causes of dyslexia

Work on the neurobiological and structural anatomical changes underlying dyslexia remains insufficient, but has important insights to build from, particularly the research program by Geschwind's student, Al Galaburda. He and his colleagues pursued post-mortem, brain tissue studies as a fundamental way to understand dyslexia and other neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., Galaburda et al., 1985). They (Galaburda, 1989) performed the first of such studies thirty years ago and showed that cytoarchitectonic changes caused by cellular migration and formation in Perisylvian regions (see also Stein, 2001) characterized the limited number of autopsied brains of individuals with dyslexia. Subsequently, using both brain and animal genetic models, Galaburda and his colleagues contributed greatly to an understanding of dyslexia at the cytoarchitectonic level by showing how disruptions in early cell migration in particular areas can impede later processing of written language.

These pioneering studies, although limited in sample size, provide evidence for the hypothesis that cortical development anomalies in key language-related brain regions could underlie Geschwind's "disconnections". These same anomalies may also underlie the lack of activation and connectivity in the neural networks associated with dyslexia on functional imaging studies (Norton & Wolf, 2012; Pugh et al., 2000).

Early and ongoing genetic studies buttress this hypothesis: for example, those genes most consistently associated with dyslexia and language processing, such as KIAA0319, are genes that regulate neuronal migration (Paracchini et al., 2006). Recent clinical and neuropathological studies in older patients with atypical neurodegenerative disease and selective language and reading symptoms complement this evidence. Miller and colleagues reported that patients with a form of aphasia characterized by a phonological variant show a higher rate of developmental dyslexia than the general population (Miller et al., 2019). The brain tissues of three of these older individuals with developmental dyslexia were recently analyzed post-mortem at the UCSF Brain bank and showed distinct cortical anomalies in well-studied language regions, in addition to the expected pathology of Alzheimer patients (Miller et al., 2019).

Taken together, these studies support a highly relevant hypothesis that early-life neurodevelopmental changes might influence not only educational attainment in childhood, but also life-long brain development. To be sure, we need more studies that investigate this longitudinal view, alongside the root causes of dyslexia at the histological level and the molecular biology level (see Krishnamurthy et al., 2019; Pugh et al., 2014). That said, the notion that neurodevelopmental, cortical changes can occur throughout the most complex and vulnerable areas in frontal, temporal, and parietal regions could both reconcile many of dyslexia's history of different hypotheses described above and also help explain the heterogeneity in the subtyping research described below.

Cognitive and neuroimaging subtype research

Early neuropsychological work in the 1970s on subtypes of individuals with learning disabilities indicated the presence of discretely different characteristics not neatly explained by single causes (see Fletcher & Satz, 1985; Satz & Morris, 1981). The early subtype classifications became increasingly methodologically sophisticated through the work of Morris, Fletcher, Lyon, Francis, and their colleagues (e.g., Morris et al., 1998). Morris et al. ( 1998) completed one of the most important studies of subtypes of students with reading disability. They found nine subtypes based on students' scores on standardized measures of PA, working memory, RAN, IQ, developmental history, and teacher reported behavior at one point in time. Like the findings by Wolf and Bowers ( 1999), the most impaired of their subtypes had multiple challenges, including both PA and RAN. Recent influential research by Ozernov-Palchik et al. ( 2017) in a group of over one thousand kindergarteners showed subgroup stability over two years. The four at-risk groups included students with weaknesses in PA, in RAN, in multiple areas including PA and RAN, and in below-average performance across all skills. There remains insufficient research on how individual subgroups change over time, particularly with appropriate intervention.

An additional, recent contribution to the research on subtypes involves brain imaging. For example, research teams headed by Gabrieli and Hoeft (Norton et al., 2014), Gaab and Ozernov-Palchik (Ozernov-Palchik et al., 2016) and Lyytinen (Lyytinen et al., 2005; Torppa et al., 2012) used brain functional imaging techniques to investigate discrete differences for different subtypes in underlying brain regions, particularly groups characterized by PA and RAN weaknesses. A different focus in a recent study using sophisticated psychophysics and neuroimaging techniques showed distinct profiles of basic auditory (non-speech sounds) and speech sound perception challenges in children with dyslexia. These profiles were associated with focal changes in specific regions of the superior temporal cortex (Qi et al., 2023). If these results were confirmed, they could reconcile the auditory and phonological processing hypotheses as different anatomical variants of the same condition. All of these studies provide critical links among neurobiological, neuroanatomical and clinical subtyping efforts (e.g., Norton et al., 2014).

Within the context of this heterogeneity have come several other new directions that involve a new look at an old hypothesis: the role of the visual system. Reminiscent of dyslexia's "word-blindness" origins, recent work by Yeatman and his colleagues has documented the critical role of the brain's visual word form area and visual spatial skills, such as spatial attention and the rapid encoding of visual information, in reading development (Kubota et al., 2019; Ramamurthy et al., 2021; Ramamurthy et al., 2022; White et al., 2019). The visual word form area (alternatively referred to as the occipital-temporal junction) has been at the fore of research on reading development by cognitive neuroscientists, including Dehaene and Cohen (Dehaene et al., 2004; McCandliss et al., 2003). Addressing one of the more persistent questions in dyslexia's history, Rueckl et al. ( 2015) have shown in imaging studies that this brain region is implicated in dyslexia in multiple languages.

Dyslexia in languages other than English

The cumulative importance of these latter directions has direct implications for any future definition of dyslexia that goes beyond unidimensional views and indeed beyond hypotheses based solely on the English written language system. As discussed in detail early on by Aro and Wimmer ( 2003), by Ziegler and Goswami ( 2005), and more recently by Daniels and Share ( 2018), most studies on dyslexia, particularly those that concentrate on the phonological-deficit hypothesis, have been conducted in English. Although the ability to map the individual phonemes of spoken English to the graphemes representing these sounds is critical in the development of decoding and spelling in alphabetic writing systems, not all alphabetic writing systems are the same, and further not all writing systems are alphabetic. It is important for research in dyslexia to account for differences in the phoneme-grapheme relationships not only in shallow orthographies like Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, and Finnish that are more transparent and consistent than deep orthographies like English and French, but also in different writing systems like Chinese and Japanese Kanji (Bolger et al., 2005). It is important, therefore, to acknowledge the crucial role played by cross-linguistic variations in orthographic transparency in both children's reading development and in our understanding of dyslexia's risk, manifestations, and progression (Kim & Petscher, 2013; Seymour et al., 2003). As one example, the important role of phonological weaknesses in the less transparent English language is not the same for children reading in more transparent languages (Anthony & Francis, 2005; Landerl et al., 2013).

By contrast, the important role of automaticity or the speed of connection between visual and language systems in reading, as indexed by RAN, appears to be more prevalent both in transparent orthographies (Georgiou et al., 2016; López-Escribano et al., 2018; Traficante, 2023) and in non-alphabetic writing systems like Chinese. Indeed, in investigations with Chinese subjects, Tan, Eden, Perfetti and others (Tan et al., 2005) likened RAN to a universal predictor because all writing systems require rapid connections between visual and language regions of the brain. In other words, RAN requires some of the same processes and same speed and seriation requirements that develop in the early reading brain's circuit regardless of writing system. Exemplifying this in a logosyllabary, Tan et al. ( 2005) found that phonological awareness made a relatively weaker contribution to Chinese children's reading development, than naming speed, writing, and orthographic awareness.

Although many subtyping efforts are based on processes underlying reading like PA and RAN, other efforts classify subtypes based on different aspects of reading performance. For example, Lovett (Lovett, 1987; Lovett et al., 1988) was one of the first researchers to classify readers on the basis of rate and/or accuracy in reading performance. More recently, Capin et al. ( 2021) identified three subtypes based on differences in word reading and listening comprehension deficits: moderate deficits in both word reading and listening comprehension, severe deficits in word reading but moderate deficits in listening comprehension, and severe deficits in listening comprehension but moderate deficits in word reading. Similarly, Kim and colleagues ( 2021) classified Korean readers into subgroups using the same analytical methods as in the Capin et al. ( 2021) study, but with a classification based on the severity of the deficit areas. Compton ( 2021) attributed such differences in Kim et al.'s ( 2021) criteria to the cross-linguistic difference in orthographic transparency, since Korean is more transparent in its orthography than English. The essential point that we wish to incorporate in any conceptualization of dyslexia is that both the known predictive factors and external variables, particularly language and orthography variation (Pugh & Verhoeven, 2018), affect our ability to predict reading development and its different forms of disruption.

Multifactorial hypotheses

In the last decade, a growing body of research on multifactorial models has been examining the effect of known predictive factors in the presence of different external factors. In multifactorial models, dyslexia, and especially its severity, is viewed as resulting from a combination of and/or interaction among risk factors, including phonological processing, RAN, and oral language problems, all of which, like dyslexia, are dimensional in nature and manifest in varying degrees of severity. Very importantly as noted by Catts and Petscher ( 2022), these complex interactions are also influenced by environmental factors like quality of instruction, language variation, parental support, and the individuals' background. Thus, multi-factorial models tend to represent dyslexia as probabilistic rather than deterministic: i.e., risk factors in conjunction with protective factors increase or decrease the likelihood of dyslexia and its severity. Risk or symptomology of learning disabilities, which can include dyslexia, is increased by factors like co-morbid developmental language, attentional, or anxiety disorders (Nelson & Harwood, 2011), exposure to trauma (Duplechain et al., 2008), consciousness of reading disability stigma (Daley & Rappolt-Schlichtmann, 2018), and teachers misunderstanding of dialectical differences (Washington & Seidenberg, 2021). Conversely, there are benefits of high-quality mentoring (Haft et al., 2019), interventions that increase feelings of motivation (Lovett et al., 2021), emotional resilience (Goldberg et al., 2003; Zheng et al., 2014), and growth mindsets (Andersen & Nielsen, 2016), familial identity and practices concerning reading (Willingham, 2015), and exposure to dynamic conversations at home (Romeo et al., 2018). These factors can decrease dyslexia symptomology, are associated with the development of parts of the reading brain circuit, and improve students' feelings about reading, in some case even controlling for effects of socioeconomic status. Within that context, in efforts to understand and define dyslexia, alongside known weaknesses, we must consider possible assets associated with dyslexia (e.g., Palser et al., 2021; Sturm et al., 2021) and individual strengths and protective factors. In other words, we must consider the role of changing environmental factors and social-emotional assets in the dynamic manifestations of dyslexia.

One of the very important additional variables that has emerged in multifactorial approaches concerns the genetic history of the individual and how this may contribute to children's reading profiles. Early on, Pennington and Smith ( 1983) reviewed all the genetic evidence about dyslexia available at the time and documented that dyslexia is strongly heritable, associated with multiple genes, and also influenced by environment. More recently, Powers, Gaab and their colleagues discovered that home literacy environments differentially influence children's reading profiles, based on their familial history of dyslexia (Powers et al., 2016).

At present there are several large-scale, genome-wide association studies that investigate more precise relationships between particular genes and specific deficits associated with dyslexia. For example, Eising et al. ( 2022) studied genetic relationships to word-reading, and Dębska, Pugh and their colleagues examined the influence of familial history of dyslexia in children's neural correlates of phonological awareness (Dębska et al., 2016). Black, Hoeft, and their colleagues identified maternal history of dyslexia to be a risk factor for developmental dyslexia (Black et al., 2012). An important addition to the existing genetic studies involves the subject populations. For example, ongoing studies by members of the Gruen lab are investigating the genetic relationships of deficits like RAN in less studied populations of African-American and Hispanic-American children and other groups underrepresented in reading research (Gialluisi et al., 2019; Truong et al., 2019).

Nevertheless, as Grigorenko ( 2022) points out in her recent review, although genetic history is the "single dominant force shaping individual differences in reading acquisition" (p.104), more robust evidence from different countries, languages, and writing system are warranted in order to generalize the evidence on the role of these genetic factors across various cultures and populations. Within that context, recent research programs by Hoeft and by Gorno-Tempini are investigating the effects of language variation, particularly children's early bilingual experiences, as well as genetic history, on our understanding of the important contributors to reading development and its potential disruptors. The latter include parental education and family financial circumstances as important contributors to students' reading development and dyslexia risk.

Along similar lines, some multifactorial models emphasize not only the importance of different language backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances, but also the different pathways in children's reading development that are due to multiple cognitive skills involved in reading comprehension. For example, Kim ( 2017) used the Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Reading model to reveal that children's working memory, theory of mind, inference, comprehension monitoring, vocabulary, grammar, word reading, and listening comprehension all collectively contributed to reading comprehension in multiple ways. Such findings are important to any conceptualization of dyslexia because they expand our understanding of reading development and failure by including language variation, the underlying roles of cognitive processes, and their combined effects on various aspects of reading, including comprehension.

Still other multifactorial studies include factors that remain insufficiently incorporated in our understanding of dyslexia, particularly protective factors like resilience and social-emotional sequelae. Risk-resilience models of dyslexia include both causal factors that put children at risk for dyslexia and resilience factors that influence more positive reading outcomes. In these models, protective factors, such as an individual's cognitive and socio-emotional strengths and resiliency (Haft et al., 2016; Palser et al., 2021; Sturm et al., 2021), environmental factors such as high-quality early reading instruction (Fletcher et al., 2019), and the confluence of these protective factors (Gotlieb et al., 2022) mitigate against poor reading in at-risk populations. Risk-resilience models that consider protective factors in combination with risk factors move our conceptualization of dyslexia away from a more exclusive focus on deficits, towards the need for understanding the role of an individual's strengths in reading outcomes.

A summary of a history of dyslexia

Examining the history of almost any conceptualization is a humbling exercise, but one with lessons that deepen our knowledge and help to guide our next steps. The history of our efforts to understand dyslexia, like the science of reading, is evolving not only with our research, but also with an understanding that each accretion of knowledge has real-life implications for the individuals with dyslexia, their teachers, families, and communities. In the next section, we examine another evolving branch of knowledge: specifically, the study of the reading brain circuit, its development, and its influences. To forecast, we believe that the coterminous examination of the history of dyslexia and the science underpinning the reading brain's development will propel our field's efforts to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the heterogeneous nature of dyslexia and indeed of the complexity of reading that underlies it.

A brief examination of the reading brain circuit: "success in circuit lies"

The current definition of dyslexia by the International Dyslexia Association begins by stating that "dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin." Although much of the research cited in this paper underscores the need for revising various other aspects of the definition, particularly the emphasis on only one typical form of deficit, the neurobiological basis remains the single most important core of the definition. We will return to the other parts of the definition in our conclusions.

It is our view that an understanding of the neurobiological basis of dyslexia is best situated within an understanding of what comprises the reading brain circuit and the not-so-simple insight that our brain was never meant to read (Wolf, 2007, 2018). Our ability to learn this evolutionarily new cognitive capacity required that the brain learn to build a new circuit by connecting multiple distributed regions across both hemispheres, all the lobes and layers of the brain, including the cerebellum (our evolutionarily older "little brain), and various key subcortical regions (Dehaene, 2009). The sum of these connected networks is a reading circuitry that has the ability to add ever more sophisticated cognitive, linguistic, and affective processes over time. Indeed, in its expert state, the original reading brain is a circuit of circuits. Further, the brain is not the only organ that supports reading; the definition states that dyslexia is neurobiological in origin, rather than neurological, in part because of the recruitment of the eyes, ears, and even viscera in reading.

We believe that the very complexity of the reading brain circuit offers another lens on why reading development is such an achievement and why it can go awry in many different ways, often as not before children even learn to read (Langer et al., 2017). A brief examination of several of the major precursor regions will help to underscore some of the ways that reading can be difficult for different children for different reasons from genetic to environmental. Indeed from the outset, multiple genes have been associated with dyslexia with some estimates of as much as 70% heritability of dyslexia (Erbeli et al., 2021). Similarly, as seen in the last section's recent history, a range of environmental factors from family socioeconomic status, language backgrounds, to quality of literacy in the home have been shown to contribute to the experience of learning to read, to the severity of dyslexia, and to the development of the reading brain. Indeed, the major components that will make up the circuit-like visual, cognitive, linguistic, and affective processes-begin their development in the first years of life when both genetic factors and the environment are highly interactive. In reading as in life, nature and nurture influence both the precursors of reading and the various ways it can be disrupted (Gotlieb et al., 2022).

To begin with language, processes undergirding phonology and semantic knowledge to syntax and morphology are essential pre-reading skills that grow exponentially, depending on the language environment of the child and the family's genetic history. Underpinning these linguistic processes are the temporal, parietal and frontal lobes of the brain with different areas specialized for different types of phonological, semantic, morphological, and grammatical knowledge. Oral language, with its involvement of speech and motor regions, requires a range of capacities that allow young children to represent phonemes in ways that differ from the way other non-speech sounds are processed. These fine-tuned phonological processes recruit multiple regions within the left frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes, such as the supramarginal gyrus, as well as right hemisphere areas responsive to aspects of oral language like rhyme and intonation (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007).

The contributions of visual areas, like the previously discussed visual word form area, underpin various orthographic skills that prepare the child to recognize and eventually represent the visual symbols and visual patterns of the child's particular writing system (Borghesani et al., 2021). Adjacent to the visual regions is the angular gyrus, an area that Geschwind ( 1965) believed key to the coordination of reading-related areas and whose disruption he associated with alexia with agraphia. The angular gyrus is involved in the connection and translation of visual information processed in the occipital region to semantically comprehensible input in the temporal regions (Pugh et al., 2000).

The cognitive components that contribute to the reading circuit include myriad areas involved in executive function processes like working memory to the formation and consolidation of background knowledge in long-term memory within various areas, particularly the medial temporal gyrus. The effortful control of attention and the ability to direct and focus it is another pre-reading skill that is associated with a frontoparietal network of cortical, subcortical and mid-layer regions in the brain.

Still another set of precursor skills that require more emphasis in the early reading circuit are the contributions of emotional engagement and the forerunners of introspection, both of which help the developing pre-reader make important affective associations to reading, as well as learn to think carefully about stories and ideas heard from books read to them. As discussed by Wolf ( 2007, 2018), these associations provide not only the ideal foundation for reading development, but also a protective factor that can affect the severity of dyslexia. The insula, buried deep within the cortex, is a critical part of the reading brain that is associated with making these strong emotional associations with reading, and, in conjunction with prefrontal structures, supports the growth of reflection and the child's own thinking over time.

Although the development of each and all of these precursor processes is evidence enough of the complexity inherent in reading development, the circuit cannot function properly without processes responsible for the rapid deployment and temporal coordination of these precursor regions with each other. Only when each component can work together at almost automatic speeds will fluent decoding and fluent comprehension become possible. The thalamus, a subcortical area of the brain, and the cerebellum are both critical for the precise timing and temporal integration of all the components of the reading circuit, just as the angular gyrus and other connective regions are involved in their coordination.

With the help of neuroscientist, artist, and cerebellum expert Catherine Stoodley, Fig. 1 provides a schematic representation of the major regions underlying processes involved in the reading brain circuit.

Regions in the reading brain circuit

The overarching leitmotiv of this brief overview and of Fig. 1 's depiction is that written language is a stunning example of the brain's ability to make all manner of new connections that were never genetically programmed like oral language and vision. The reading circuit represents an extraordinary leap forward in the brain's use of its neuroplasticity to make new circuits for novel human inventions like literacy and numeracy. The complexity and the plasticity of the new circuit, however, contribute to both its Achilles-like strength and vulnerability. For, with such complexity and neuroplasticity-based adaptational ability, no one source of disruption and no one environmental influence will be sufficient to capture all forms of its failure in all individuals. Just as the history of dyslexia is pockmarked by various explanations, the circuit is subject to different causes of disruption or failure and different influences.

Bringing history and the reading brain circuit together

Returning to our initial use of Emily Dickinson's "circuitous" approach to truth, we wish now to connect the two sections of this paper. In Fig. 2, we have graphed many of the names used in the history of dyslexia onto the reading brain circuit. Note that when the various names for dyslexia over the last century and a half are mapped on the underlying regions, they provide a surprisingly close approximation of the reading brain circuit. In other words, if something can go wrong in the reading brain circuit, at some point in the history of dyslexia, it has gone awry and become the basis of the next new name and next causal hypothesis. The two sections of this paper converge to provide the basis for the heterogenous nature of dyslexia, the first of several principles that go beyond the original definition of dyslexia.

A Map of the history of explanations for dyslexia

By looking at both history and the reading brain circuitry together, there are several principles that we believe are key for a new conceptualization and eventual definition of dyslexia. First, there will be different manifestations of dyslexia depending on what is most vulnerable in the circuit for a given language. Although the natural desire in science for parsimony has made the more unitary hypotheses of dyslexia dominate its history, the cumulative history of dyslexia and the reading brain itself reveal that there will be no single form of dyslexia, an understanding further confirmed by cross-linguistic and cross-writing system studies. There will be different profiles of characteristics among children with dyslexia across languages with weaknesses in phoneme awareness, the processes underlying RAN, and potentially other language, visual, and executive functions presenting in different combinations, depending on the writing system (Daniels & Share, 2018; Share, 2021).

Second, the reality that dyslexia is developmental and influenced by both genetic and environmental factors adds further complexity. The influences of language variation and language/literacy background, cultural heritage, type and intensity of instruction and intervention will impact how dyslexia manifests in a given individual over time. Although dyslexia can be effectively remediated, especially when the particular areas of weakness are identified early on in individual learners (Lovett et al., 2017; Ozernov-Palchik & Gaab, 2016), the neurobiological differences in the brain's organization remain largely the same across the lifespan. It is in this sense that dyslexia is not so much a reading disorder, but rather a different organization of the brain. This organization disadvantages the acquisition of the human species' relatively new invention of reading through various disruptions to the reading circuit, including neurodevelopmental anomalies before the circuit is formed, as well as can give advantages in other arenas when enabled to do so.

Third, and an outgrowth of the second principle, the differences in brain organization that have historically been conceptualized largely in terms of weaknesses and deficits should be researched and described in conjunction with concomitant strengths and explicitly disassociated with any lack of intelligence. Indeed, the areas of weakness will be impacted by the opportunities individuals with dyslexia have to develop their potential strengths, particularly in visual-spatial skills (Schneps et al., 2012; Von Karolyi et al., 2003; Wolff & Lundberg, 2002), interpersonal skills (Palser et al., 2021; Sturm et al., 2021), and declarative memory (Hedenius et al., 2013). Currently, research into educational practices to support the strengths associated with dyslexia is still limited, especially for marginalized youth (Blanchett, 2010). Although there is some evidence to suggest that dyslexia is not associated with greater creativity (Erbeli et al., 2022), the history of individuals with dyslexia illustrates the over-representation of people with dyslexia in the arts, entrepreneurship, and other professions that rely on abilities to think and perceive "outside the box" (Logan, 2009). Therefore, asset-based teaching pedagogies for students with dyslexia (Orkin et al., 2022) must be further explored in future research.

It is critical to the societal understanding of dyslexia that, although it is typically described as a specific learning disability, dyslexia is a learning difference that becomes a disability to the extent that environments are disabling. There are social and emotional sequela often associated with environments that make students feel ashamed or lacking in intelligence. Noted long ago by Orton and by Geschwind ( 1982) in a paper memorably titled "Why Orton was Right", there is a greater vulnerability to mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression (Maughan & Carroll, 2006; Sturm et al., 2021) among individuals with dyslexia. It is essential, therefore, both for the public and for the individuals with dyslexia that the content of our definition helps to combat negative stereotypes about dyslexia and appreciate the role of environment, including educational and socioeconomic context, in contributing to dyslexia.

Such a definition should ensure that teachers, parents, and students know that individuals with dyslexia are lacking neither in intelligence nor potential talents; and that with appropriate, evidence-based, structured literacy interventions, particularly those with emphases on resilience, persistence, and esteem (Gotlieb et al., 2022; Haft et al., 2016; Hendren et al., 2018; Lovett et al., 2017, 2022; Lyon & Goldberg, 2023; Morris et al., 2012; Rappolt-Schlichtmann et al., 2018), they can and will learn to read, even when early environments did not provide optimal supports. The history of rigorous reading intervention studies in the last twenty years underscores how well we can remediate children at risk for dyslexia, regardless of their race, socioeconomic background, or IQ. There are no silver bullets to intervention, but individuals with dyslexia can and will learn to read, particularly when provided interventions that are early, evidence-based, structured, multicomponential, and explicitly taught (Lovett et al., 2017; Lovett et al., 2022; Lyon & Goldberg, 2023; Morris et al., 2012). In the process, such interventions increase the social-emotional wellbeing of struggling readers (Traficante et al., 2017).

Conclusions: Towards a dynamic, comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia

The history of our understanding of dyslexia has continuously been evolving, just as is our research into the reading brain circuit's complex origins and its potentially even more complex future in the digital culture. What is constant is change, not only in our concepts of dyslexia, but also within how individuals with dyslexia change over time according to how they are taught, how they are perceived, and how their individual strengths are enabled by society. Thus, the very definition of dyslexia itself must be dynamic and designed to change with newer knowledge and ever more sophisticated and comprehensive insights into its diagnosis and instruction. Here, we have discussed the existence of different subtypes of dyslexia that may depend on an individuals' unique neurodevelopmental profile, language system, social-emotional and environmental factors, strengths, and preventative factors. Although the prevalence of particular subtypes of dyslexia may vary over time and context, the heterogeneity of dyslexia will persist.

Our contributions to efforts to construct a new definition will be in the form of principles we hope will be embedded by those ultimately responsible for writing this definition.

1. 1.
Dyslexia represents a unique organization of the human brain that is characterized by both disadvantages and advantages, both of which are influenced by neurodevelopmental, genetic, and environmental factors that have no relationship to intelligence.

2. 2.
The most common disadvantages include unexpected difficulties in the acquisition of accurate and/or fluent reading, spelling, and comprehension.

3. 3.
The most common predictive factors include independent or combined weaknesses in phonological components of language and processes indexed by naming speed, either of which can co-occur with multiple other factors such as executive function and visual-orthographic-related processes.

4. 4.
There will be different manifestations of dyslexia depending on what is most vulnerable in the reading circuit for a given language and writing system.

5. 5.
Both the risk for and developmental course of dyslexia are influenced by social, emotional, and environmental factors that range from socioeconomic background and language variation to emotional vulnerabilities and educational experience.

6. 6.
Although typically classified as a specific learning disability, dyslexia should never be associated with a lack of intelligence, talent, or effort. With appropriate, evidence-based, structured literacy instruction that is provided as early as possible, individuals with dyslexia can learn to read and develop their full potential.

7. 7.
Dyslexia can change over time, particularly when the strengths and advantages of its unique differences in brain organization are fostered alongside preventive factors that emphasize resiliency, persistence of effort, and respect for the potential of every individual.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Education, University of California, Moore Hall 2123, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1521, USA

Maryanne Wolf, Rebecca J. M. Gotlieb, Sohyun An Kim, Veronica Pedroza & Laura V. Rhinehart

2. School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, USA

Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini

3. Michael D. Eisner College of Education, California State University, Northridge, USA

Sue Sears

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Correspondence to Maryanne Wolf.

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Maryanne Wolf is one of the co-authors of the RAN/RAS naming speed measure that is published by Pro-Ed, for which she receives financial royalties.

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Wolf, M., Gotlieb, R.J.M., Kim, S.A. et al. Towards a dynamic, comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia. Ann. of Dyslexia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-023-00297-1
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Towards a dynamic, comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia - Annals of Dyslexia

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Here we build from the central strength of the existing definition of dyslexia-its emphasis on neurobiological origins-and proffer a set of seven core principles for a new, more comprehensive conceptualization of dyslexia.

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Professor Emerita, Department of Special Education, California State University, Northridge

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Director, UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice

The UC|CSU Collaborative for Neuroscience, Diversity, and Learning brings together experts in research and practice from the University of California and California State University with the goal of improving literacy for all children, particularly those with reading challenges such as dyslexia. This work comprises one aspect of the larger mission of the Collaborative.

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We are conducting ongoing research in the neurosciences, psychology, and education. Our aim is to build a more holistic understanding of the reader, the reading brain, and the teaching of reading to all learners, with all their neurodiversity.

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read." ¹
"We are all good at speech, but disabled as readers and writers; the difference among us in reading/writing is simply that some are fairly easy to cure and some are not." ²

Helping children learn to read is big business. From expensive literacy curricula and remedial programs to one-day workshops and brain-training fads, there are too many claims of guaranteed success and too little focus on trustworthy findings. Having been researchers studying mechanisms for improving literacy outcomes for more than 30 years, we offer a more sober-and sobering-review of what is known about how to help struggling readers.

To begin, we confess that there are some rather large holes in our collective knowledge. We know more about the science of reading than the science of reading instruction. In other words, we know a lot more about what components are associated with improved outcomes for each stage of reading development (e.g., phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle are essential for beginning readers) than we do about how to teach all these components to a class of students with diverse learning needs. Similarly, we know more about interventions for students with mild to moderate reading difficulties than we do about students with severe reading difficulties. Students with very low reading skills-those at the bottom 10th percentile of word reading and lower-have been challenging to impact. Finally, in policy development, we have not capitalized on theory and science for effectively implementing new practices in schools. ³ Still, there is much we do know that can support excellent instruction. Both here and in two online supplements- "It's Time to Act on a 20-Year-Old Consensus" and "Three Things We Need to Learn" -we offer guidance to prevent and address reading difficulties. There is no doubt that some children have reading disabilities, but the key to improved outcomes for the vast majority of struggling readers, including those with a reading disability, is enhanced core instruction-and that means enhanced curricula, assessments, pre-service and in-service professional development, and supports.

In the high-functioning system we describe below, the primary focus is on assessing changes in children's reading abilities as a response to instruction and on building educators' capacity to deliver more intense, customized interventions. To be effective, such assessments and interventions need to be delivered through a seamless system of well-coordinated general and special education supports that emphasizes prevention, reduces inappropriate referral to and placement in special education as a function of low reading ability, and provides more intensive interventions for students with reading disabilities. Inappropriate referral to and placement in special education is often a function of identifying students as needing special education who have not received an adequate opportunity to learn, as well as the view that special education is the solution for all children who do not readily learn to read. Some students are not given an opportunity to learn because they move frequently or are absent often; others are present day after day but are taught with programs and practices that are not based on the science of reading. Because so few teacher preparation programs, school districts, and commercially available programs have implemented consistently what we have learned from the science of reading, far too many students struggle-feeling like they are reading failures, not realizing that they were never provided the explicit instruction they need to succeed.* The vast majority of students with low reading achievement have preventable problems: with explicit, evidence-based instruction, they would learn to read.

These evidence-based practices are fundamental and necessary not only to develop strong readers but also to discern the differences between students with reading difficulties that can be readily supported through general education from those with serious reading disabilities or dyslexia. For the purposes of this article, we are using reading disabilities and dyslexia synonymously to refer to children with foundational decoding and spelling problems.

Students in classrooms where evidence-based fundamentals of reading instruction are deliberately implemented are far less likely to demonstrate reading difficulties. Enhanced general education instruction in the early grades reduces the number of children who do not meet grade-level benchmarks and start to fall behind, and therefore it reduces eventual referrals to special education.

We recognize that teachers-even those with the most advanced knowledge and skills-cannot and should not be asked to carry the entire burden of improving reading outcomes for all learners. We think there is ample evidence to suggest that educational systems can be organized so that the vast majority of students-close to 95 percent-will be reasonably successful readers when these organized systems are effectively implemented. ⁴ The roughly 5 percent of students who do not make adequate progress when these systems are in place are likely truly reading disabled because of the persistence of their reading difficulties. They too can improve their reading skills, but they require highly specialized, intensive interventions and may have difficulty reading throughout their lives.

Why Do Some Children Learn to Read Easily, While Others Struggle?

Learning to read is a process that occurs so readily for some youngsters that it seems to develop almost naturally. With minimal guidance and feedback, some students are on their way to recognizing the patterns of written words and inferring the ways in which our phonological system (sounds of language) map to our complex orthography (written system). But for other students-anywhere from 40 to 65 percent-the task of learning to read is much more challenging. If these students do not receive highly explicit instruction with additional opportunities for implicit learning, difficulties in learning to read proficiently are inevitable. These more challenging readers are the ones who require the most knowledgeable and skillful teachers.

Reading science has established that learning to read is an acquired process, not a natural process-it's nothing like learning to walk or talk. There are no brain systems evolutionarily designed for reading. Rather, neural circuits for language and visual processing must be repurposed and reorganized to support literacy. ⁵ One neural circuit involves the ability to process sublexical units of words, initially at the phonological level. The child must take what is essentially an implicit understanding of the sound system of language and explicitly apply it to print. ⁶ Once this repurposing begins, another neural circuit designed for face and object recognition has to become a rapid letter and word processor; this reorganization of the circuit requires considerable meaningful exposure to print. As these circuits are revamped, they form a system, which usually takes several years to become well developed, that enables the child to process print with immediate access to the meaning of the word, which is sometimes described as "language at the speed of sight." ⁷ If a child does not have access because of struggles with mastering the alphabetic principle, this system does not develop adequately and the child falls behind in the ability to automatically recognize letter patterns. Reading becomes an effortful, unenjoyable process. Because all children must reorganize these neural circuits into a reading brain, prevention programs must focus on early acquisition of these skills. It is very hard to catch up if mastering the alphabetic principle is delayed. This is why prevention is more effective and less costly than remediation. ⁸

Students with reading disabilities have great difficulty acquiring foundational, word-level reading skills; they do not decode words accurately or fluently, and often they have poor spelling. Except for assessing to determine children's responses to instruction, there are no effective methods for differentiating subgroups of children with word-level problems. Students with reading disabilities (dyslexia) are real and represent the largest group of children in special education, even though in many cases stronger instruction in the earlier grades may have prevented the special education referral; they also comprise a large portion of the general education population that does not read well but has not been identified for special education.

Preventing reading difficulties is about making sure every child is exposed to reading instruction that is sufficiently explicit and customized to support the acquisition of foundational skills within a language-rich learning environment that promotes vocabulary and background knowledge. This will reduce unnecessary special education referral and identification. Students with significant, intractable reading problems that are not responsive to evidence-based instruction meet an important threshold for special education referral and identification. However, students who have not consistently had access to evidence-based instruction (because they are absent often or because their school district is not aware of the science of reading) are the students for whom reading difficulties can be prevented. While adequately addressing all the issues related to reading disabilities and dyslexia is beyond the scope of this article, we highlight "18 Common Misunderstandings of Dyslexia" in the box on the right.

How Should Educational Systems Be Organized So That the Vast Majority of Students Learn to Read?

Nearly two decades ago, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education ¹⁷ made three recommendations that-if fully implemented-could dramatically improve the instruction children receive and their reading achievement. The first recommendation was to focus on results, not process. The commission observed that special education was a highly bureaucratic process that did a good job in providing civil rights protection once a child was identified, but did not show strong evidence for accelerated gains in learning. It recommended the simplification of paperwork requirements and a change in monitoring of school-based implementation of special education to a focus on outcomes.

The second recommendation was to embrace a model of prevention, not a model of failure. Many literacy problems can be resolved with early intervention, so the commission advocated for universal screening, progress monitoring, and increasingly intense intervention based on instructional response; prevention was to start upon school entry and be supported by special education personnel. These methods, originally subsumed under a response to intervention (RTI) rubric, are now often referred to as multiple tiers of systematic support (MTSS).

The third recommendation was to consider children with disabilities as general education children first. Although requirements for placement in the least restrictive environment result in many children with reading disabilities spending the bulk of their school day in general education, there is often little alignment between the approaches to literacy instruction in general and special education. The primary special education intervention often involves accommodations, not remedial interventions to significantly improve students' reading ability.

We, as well as others, have summarized a model for preventing reading difficulties that aligns with an RTI/MTSS approach. ²³ The fundamental principle of prevention is screening to identify risk early. ²⁴ The idea is that it is better to over-identify children at risk for reading problems as early as possible and provide necessary instruction than to under-identify and have large numbers of students who suffer as their problems linger without the required instructional supports. An overview of this system for preventing reading difficulties is illustrated in the "Tiers of Instruction" below.

Tiers of Instruction
The Tiers of Instruction describes a model for providing increasingly customized reading interventions to students at risk for reading problems. Commonly presented as a triangle, we have tipped the triangle to emphasize the primacy of Tier 1 instruction for all students. Tiers 2 and 3 increase intensity for students who do not respond adequately to instruction. The percentages represent estimates, based on effective implementation of a multi-tiered system, of how many children are likely to be at or near grade level and only need Tier 1 (effective, evidence-based instruction for the whole class), at risk of reading difficulties and require Tier 2 (targeted, efficient supplemental instruction), or at risk of severe challenges and require Tier 3 (intensive, customized intervention, often with special education and/or dyslexia services).

From J. M. Fletcher, G. R. Lyon, L. S. Fuchs, and M. A. Barnes, Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019), 91. Copyright Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission from Guilford Press.

In this seamless, supportive system, all students are screened. Those at risk for reading difficulties receive continued evidence-based Tier 1 literacy instruction in the classroom, ongoing progress monitoring, and, if needed, a Tier 2 intervention that addresses their specific literacy problems. This Tier 2 intervention may be provided by the classroom teacher, a trained teaching assistant supervised by the classroom teacher, or an educational specialist such as a reading teacher. Tier 2 interventions are not part of a special education but rather an extension or supplement within general education. Students participate in Tier 2 intervention for a specified period of time, typically 8-12 weeks, with ongoing progress monitoring, approximately every two weeks. Using progress monitoring data and teachers' observations, each student's response to literacy instruction is determined (e.g., is the student reaching expected benchmarks?).

If the student's response is not sufficient to meet progress monitoring benchmarks, there are several options, including adjusting the instruction, changing the group, adjusting the group size, changing the intervention, or providing an increasingly intensive intervention (which may be longer, e.g., 30-45 minutes rather than 20 minutes, and more customized to each student's needs). If inadequate instructional response continues, the educational team or parent/guardian may determine that an eligibility evaluation for special education is in order. The advantage to this approach is that students are provided appropriate, evidence-based instruction early; for the majority of students, this rapid Tier 2 intervention is adequate for becoming strong readers. Only those students with persistent and significant reading difficulties would be referred for special education or dyslexia services.

Throughout this model, screening and progress monitoring are critical. Most schools across the United States are implementing screening approaches to reading difficulties that ostensibly identify those youngsters who are at risk for reading failure. It is mandated for dyslexia in over 40 states. ²⁵ Effective screeners (1) require 10 minutes or less per child, (2) demonstrate strong psychometric properties (e.g., are valid and reliable), (3) provide readily usable data that identify students as either at risk or not at risk, (4) are developmentally appropriate and can be administered two to three times per year, and (5) are easily scored. Errors in identifying which children are at risk of reading difficulties are inevitable, but we think schools should focus on reducing errors that result in not identifying risk (false negatives). In other words, it is better for a child who does not need extra instruction to get it than for a child who does need extra instruction to go without.

For progress monitoring, short probes involving timed word or passage reading are used so that teachers can make instructional decisions. ²⁶ These types of assessments are aimed at improving instruction and determining each student's incremental progress, recognizing that for students who are consistently making inadequate progress, additional interventions may be warranted. (For an easy-to-use review of progress monitoring tools, see here.)

Progress monitoring data can be useful in many ways. First, these data can document that students are learning the critical aspects of reading (e.g., sound-spelling patterns, vocabulary) being taught. Second, the types of responses students provide can guide instruction by highlighting each student's needs for reteaching and additional practice, while those elements that appear to be successfully learned can be monitored for maintenance. Third, data from these measures can facilitate decisions about curriculum (e.g., whether additional or different programs are needed), grouping (e.g., some students may benefit from a more advanced group; others may benefit from a mini one-on-one lesson to enhance performance), and interventions (e.g., whether to continue an intervention). Fourth, these data-especially ongoing progress monitoring data-can inform decisions about referral to and placement in special education. If special education eligibility becomes an issue, the best signal is the intractability of the child's reading problems when provided with the explicit instruction that works for most children.

How Can a Supportive, Integrated General and Special Education System Be Implemented?

Developing a systemic approach to supporting teachers so that they can meet the needs of the range of readers in their classrooms requires ongoing screening, monitoring students' responses to instruction so that teachers can adjust instruction to meet students' needs, and fidelity of implementation to ensure adherence to treatment protocols. But seamlessly assembling all these pieces is not easy.

First, most educators, including teachers and school leaders, would benefit from ongoing situated professional development that builds on the knowledge they have and extends it in ways that may be readily implemented in their school setting. What happens when you say "professional development" to most educators? Do they smile with anticipation about what they will learn and how they can implement it in their school? Typically, no. Too often, professional development is a one-day exposure to ideas (of varying quality), many of which are lost before the next day at school.

We are suggesting a distributed professional development model that provides ongoing learning opportunities as each aspect of the new system is launched. This model can follow standards like those from Learning Forward. Workshops on how to screen children and offer highly effective Tier 1 instruction would be followed with in-class coaching and support until the majority of educators were aligning their practices with data on outcomes. Then, educators would learn how to extend their Tier 1 practices with Tier 2 supplemental interventions, increasing time in literacy instruction for students who are not making sufficient progress. This would ensure that the instruction children receive in Tiers 1 and 2 is well aligned, which increases effectiveness.

Adding Tier 3 instruction requires yet more professional development, coaching, and coordination. Tier 3 more intensively focuses intervention on students' skill gaps and may be guided by more diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments. Students in Tier 3 may be candidates for special education and/or dyslexia identification and services. Because of the focus on individual skill gaps, it is not as tightly aligned with Tier 1 (regular classroom instruction), but Tier 1 remains essential for providing a comprehensive reading program. For example, a child receiving Tier 3 intervention for specific decoding skills needs Tier 1 core instruction to continue progressing in vocabulary, listening comprehension, writing across genres, and other aspects of English language arts.

Building up the seamless system takes time and a great deal of in-class support for teachers-but it is far more effective than scattershot workshops. Preventing and addressing reading difficulties is hard, but the effort pays big dividends in reducing reading difficulties. We urge schools, districts, and states to put far more effort into systemic supports (especially the professional development and coaching for teachers and administrators described here). We recommend beginning in grade 1, where the strongest evidence of the efficacy of these approaches exists, and then expanding to other grades.

What Can Teachers Do Now to Support Students with Reading Difficulties or with Mild to Moderate Disabilities or Dyslexia?

Most of what we describe above requires system-level change. But teachers want to do what's best for their students today. Here are six steps that teachers can implement in their classrooms now (and that school leaders should start supporting immediately).

1. Use academic learning time deliberately and purposefully to ensure students receive the maximum amount of evidence-based instruction. Academic engagement-i.e., time on task-is an excellent predictor of academic outcomes.²⁷ Consider how much time you spend explicitly teaching and providing highly focused instructional time. Observation studies reveal that surprisingly little class time is devoted to explicitly teaching the high-priority skills associated with improved reading outcomes.²⁸ Consider ways to structure your classroom, teaching, and resources so that maximum time is spent on instruction and minimal time is lost to transitions, over-explaining, and behavioral management.

2. Consider the value of the one-minute lesson. Many students with significant reading difficulties benefit from a one-minute lesson in which they are provided a mini review of a challenging task, an opportunity to practice word reading with feedback, or a chance to demonstrate what they know with feedback. Time is always an issue, but do not allow it to block you from spending highly focused instructional minutes with the students who need you the most.

3. Offer customized instruction that reflects students' learning needs. Many of the students you teach learn to read almost effortlessly. However, students with reading difficulties, disabilities, or dyslexia require highly customized instruction that aligns with their specific learning needs. How can you determine what this customized instruction might be? Examine their screening and progress monitoring data. Determine the high-priority areas in which they require additional instruction and practice. Identify ways to include this type of work each day in an individual mini lesson or with a small group of students with similar needs. Provide practice opportunities with feedback so they have multiple opportunities to acquire proficiency.

4. Give struggling readers instruction in small groups, in pairs, or one on one. Many students with reading difficulties benefit from the specialized instruction that is allowable in small-group, paired, and one-on-one instruction. These formats provide opportunities to tailor instruction to their needs with appropriate practice and targeted feedback.

5. Create many opportunities to read a range of text types and a range of text levels. Students who struggle with reading benefit from opportunities to generalize their reading to varied text types, including digital texts, informational texts, and narrative texts as well as hybrid informational and narrative texts such as biographies. This variation in text types is not just for older students but can be part of the listening comprehension and text reading of younger students, including beginning readers. Also, consider ways to vary the text levels that students read. Students can read and comprehend more advanced texts when they have adequate background knowledge, are motivated by the topic, and/or have additional instructional support.

6. Provide explicit instruction that incorporates clear feedback. Explicit instruction with feedback is highly effective, especially when students are having difficulty learning with less explicit methods. Teachers who offer this type of evidence-based instruction do the following:

Identify, prior to teaching, what they expect the students to do or say.

State clearly and in as few words as possible what they need students to know.

Model what they expect students to say or do.

Ask students to demonstrate what is expected (e.g., blend phonemes, read a word, read a text silently).

Provide prompt feedback that is specific and clear (e.g., "I heard several of you blending the sounds /r/, /a/, /t/ and then saying the word 'rat.' That is what I expect. I also heard several of you only saying the word 'rat' and not blending the sounds. I will give you three more sounds, and I want everyone to both blend the sounds and say the word.").

Give selected students opportunities to respond independently (and avoid only calling on the most capable students).

Control the task difficulty by making the task less difficult for students in need of adaptation and then gradually increasing the task difficulty as their performance improves.

Maintain high levels of student success, engagement, and response.

Wrap Up

The degree to which a student expresses a reading difficulty is always an interaction between the child's opportunity to learn (due to absences, instructional quality, or other issues) and the extent of the student's reading impairment. Thus, youngsters who are provided a genuine opportunity to learn to read-including high-quality, explicit, evidence-based instruction-and yet still present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have a severe reading impairment. In contrast, children who have not consistently been able to access high-quality, evidence-based instruction and present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have reading problems that could have been prevented and still can be remediated. This difference is of the utmost importance. Currently, there are students with preventable reading problems who are suffering academically and emotionally, and who are placed in special education often to receive accommodations without effective remediation. And there are students with severe reading disabilities or dyslexia who are not getting the intensive interventions they need-in part because special education is overwhelmed with large numbers of students who do not actually have reading disabilities.

This must end, but teachers cannot solve these problems on their own. These are systemic problems-and that is why we have proposed a new, seamless, three-tiered system of general and special education to address them. Far too many students and teachers are struggling. It is long past time for leaders of schools, districts, and states-not to mention teacher preparation programs, curriculum developers, and professional development providers-to step up, change their policies and programs, and focus on meeting children's needs.

Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor in the Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders program. She has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Literacy and Learning and the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children. Jack M. Fletcher is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he is also the associate vice president for research administration. A former member of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, he has earned the International Literacy Association's Albert J. Harris Award and the International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award. This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the authors are solely responsible for the content).

*To learn more about how preparation programs, professional development, and other key supports could be improved, see "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science" in the Summer 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. R. Lyon et al., "Rethinking Learning Disabilities," in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, ed. C. E. Finn et al. (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, 2001), 287.
2. A. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech Affect Research in Reading and Writing," in Foundations of Reading Acquisition and Dyslexia: Implications for Early Intervention, ed. B. Blachman (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 5.
3. L. Sanetti and M. Collier-Meek, Supporting Successful Interventions in Schools: Tools to Plan, Evaluate, and Sustain Effective Implementation (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
4. J. Fletcher and S. Vaughn, "Response to Intervention: Preventing and Remediating Academic Difficulties," Child Development Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2009): 30-37; and A. VanDerHeyden, J. Witt, and D. Gilbertson, "A Multi-Year Evaluation of the Effects of a Response to Intervention (RTI) on Identification of Children for Special Education," Journal of School Psychology 45, no. 2 (2007): 225-256.
5. S. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).
6. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech."
7. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
8. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
9. A. VanDerHeyden, M. Burns, and W. Bonifay, "Is More Screening Better? The Relationship Between Frequent Screening, Accurate Decisions, and Reading Proficiency," School Psychology Review 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-82.
10. J. Fletcher and D. Currie, "Vision Efficiency Interventions and Reading Disability," Perspectives on Language and Literacy 37, no. 1 (2011): 21-24.
11. J. M. Fletcher et al., Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
12. A. E. Cunningham et al., "Disciplinary Knowledge of K-3 Teachers and Their Knowledge Calibration in the Domain of Early Literacy," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 139-167; and L. Spear-Swerling and P. Brucke, "Preparing Novice Teachers to Develop Basic Reading and Spelling Skills in Children," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 332-364.
13. J. Worthy, "'We Know for a Fact': Dyslexia Interventionists and the Power of Authoritative Discourse," Journal of Literacy Research 50, no. 3 (2018): 359-382.
14. R. Peterson and B. Pennington, "Developmental Dyslexia," The Lancet 379, no. 9830 (2012): 1997-2007.
15. S. Shaywitz et al., "Persistence of Dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence," Pediatrics 104, no. 6 (1999): 1351-1359.
16. A. Ellis, Reading, Writing and Dyslexia: A Cognitive Analysis (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1993).
17. US Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families (Washington, DC: 2002).
18. M. Snowling and M. Melby-Lervåg, "Oral Language Deficits in Familial Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis and Review," Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 5 (2016): 498-545.
19. See, for example, M. Melby-Lervåg, T. Redick, and C. Hulme, "Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of 'Far Transfer': Evidence from a Meta-Analytic Review," Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016): 512-534.
20. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain.
21. M. Scheiman, "Effect of Vergence/Accommodative Therapy on Reading in Children with Convergence Insufficiency: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Optometry and Vision Science 96, no. 11 (2019): 836-849.
22. L. Tamm, "Comparing Treatments for Children with ADHD and Word Reading Difficulties: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 85, no. 5 (2017): 434-446.
23. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
24. For similar models, see G. Batsche et al., Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation (Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 2005); and J. Kovaleski, A. VanDerHeyden, and E. Shapiro, The RTI Approach to Evaluating Learning Disabilities (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
25. Y. Petscher et al., Screening for Dyslexia (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy, 2019).
26. L. Fuchs et al., "Bringing Data-Based Individualization to Scale: A Call for the Next-Generation Technology of Teacher Supports," Journal of Learning Disabilities (forthcoming).
27. C. Greenwood, B. Horton, and C. Utley, "Academic Engagement: Current Perspectives on Research and Practice," School Psychology Review 31, no. 3 (2002): 328-349; and J. Stallings, R. Johnson, and J. Goodman, "Engaged Rates: Does Grade Level Make a Difference?," Journal of Research in Childhood Education 1 (1986): 20-26.
28. D. Chard and E. Kameenui, "Struggling First-Grade Readers: The Frequency and Progress of Their Reading," Journal of Special Education 34, no. 1 (2000): 28-38; and S. Vaughn et al., "Reading Instruction for Students with LD and EBD: A Synthesis of Observation Studies," Journal of Special Education 36, no. 1 (2002): 2-13.
29. See, for example, M. Lovett et al., "Treating the Core Deficits of Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence of Transfer of Learning After Phonologically- and Strategy-Based Reading Training Programs," Developmental Psychology 30, no. 6 (1994): 805-822; and R. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation for Developmental Reading Disabilities: IQ, Socioeconomic Status, and Race as Factors in Remedial Outcome," Journal of Learning Disabilities 45, no. 2 (2012): 99-127.
30. M. Lovett, R. Barron, and J. Frijters, "Word Identification Difficulties in Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: Intervention Research Findings," in Handbook of Learning Disabilities, ed. H. Swanson, K. Harris, and S. Graham (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
31. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation."
32. C. Denton et al., "An Evaluation of Intensive Intervention for Students with Persistent Reading Difficulties," Journal of Learning Disabilities 39, no. 5 (2006): 447-466.

[illustrated by Jia Liu]

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read."