Dyslexia in Classroom Practice

By Marcia Ribble
University of Cincinnati

My first encounter as a teacher with a student in college who has learning disabilities occurred when one of my very bright students presented me with paper after paper full of spelling errors.

“What's up?” I asked her about those errors.

“I don't know,” she replied. “I've never been able to spell. In grade school they told me I was lazy, or stubborn, or just plain stupid. I knew I wasn't any of those things, but I didn't know how to explain it to the teachers who just gave up on me. My one son can't spell either, and neither can my dad.”

“Hmmm, have you ever been tested for dyslexia?” I asked her, explaining a little bit about what it is and how problems with spelling can be a symptom of it.

My student arranged through her physician to be tested. She came in later and told me that she and her son both have problems with dyslexia.

“It's such a relief to know that I have been smart all these years and still can't spell,” she told me. “Now I can tell my son's teachers that if they say or do mean things to him, I will sue them and the school district. No one will do to him what they did to me.”

This student was able to seek and find testing for her dyslexia, a process, I really had no real knowledge of at the time. How did one become tested? What kinds of options were available to students? Were those options fairly well standardized across the nations college campuses? Well, I was to discover that the options varied greatly from campus to campus, and from institutions where testing is quite easily obtained and free to those where outside testing must be done and students bear the costs associated with the testing.

This interaction occurred in the early 1990s, long after dyslexia had become a well-known problem affecting students and their outcomes in school. My student was a young mother in her early thirties, and her teachers in grade and high school had never informed her that she might have a problem, never helped her to discover ways to mitigate her problem, and actually exacerbated the problem of dyslexia she was experiencing. This is unfortunately still happening in classrooms in colleges today, because most of us have received absolutely no training in recognizing dyslexia in student work. We've only been trained to see error and to expect students to be able to correct error in their writing. Then, when we do begin to recognize dyslexia, we may discover that our students find it nearly impossible to access testing that can confirm our suspicion that our students may need additional help to succeed in our classes.

I first became aware of the lack of testing resources only a few years ago. One of my students was presenting some of the classical symptoms of dyslexia. His primary symptom was a lack of connection between his oral discussions of his ideas and his work on paper. We talked about it and decided that it would be good for him to receive testing for dyslexia. I called the college's Disability Services office. What I discovered was a quagmire of rules and regulations regarding the offering of “special help” to students. I was frustrated and angry because the college was determined not to offer any help to any student who was not “officially tested and recognized as dyslexic,” but which also did not offer testing itself. My student would have to drive over an hour away, to a quite large city, find a clinic there which specialized in testing, and be tested before he could receive any special consideration in his classes. I was told that the reason for this state of affairs was a set of legal issues and the college was very strict about who could and who could not receive extra support for their college coursework.

My student had enough financial and other resources to be tested, but before the results of the tests were revealed, the semester had ended and my student had failed the course. He let me know the next semester that he had, indeed, been confirmed as having multiple dyslexia issues and was now formally and institutionally “entitled” to receive additional support. His second term, however, he encountered a teacher who didn't believe in supporting students who have dyslexia, and who failed him again. This teacher believes that if a student receives help of any kind that student has committed an act of plagiarism. Despite a confirmed diagnosis of dyslexia, the classroom teacher had the power to determine that only those students who can independently control their writing in an in-class essay should be in college, claiming that she was seeking to affirm the excellence of the college's graduates. Her way of determining what is excellence does not allow any students with handicaps such as dyslexia to succeed.

The ultimate result was that my student left the college, attempted briefly to try his luck at a second college, and dropped out of school altogether after another semester. Because he had not been able to receive more immediate help and had already established a pattern of failure in his writing classes, my student was not retained at my institution, he was also not retained elsewhere. Despite being bright, he gave up on education, because education had failed him. The Disability Services folks were far more concerned about making sure that any additional support students received was legitimated than they were about retaining a bright student whose writing didn't reflect his intelligence. Some faculty members are also responsible because they refuse to admit that students with dyslexia have a right to an education despite their handicap.

After conducting a brief survey of testing at other institutions, I can report that he's not alone in that experience. There is no uniformity of responses to students with dyslexia and other types of handicaps that cause them to need more help in the classroom. Some colleges and universities have great resources for testing and supporting students, while others do not. Some faculty members are sensitive to the needs and the rights of students with disabilities, while others are not and actually seek to reject those students.

Those of us who teach writing have all had the experience of encountering students who present us with writing full of the repertoire of errors described by Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations. Some of those errors clear up the minute we make it known that they will result in lowered grades. However, others remain for students who may never have been tested for dyslexia, but who are still dealing with its challenges as adults—often without knowing what the problem is. Some students who are resentful of being singled out in high school (and perhaps teased as different) due to a diagnosis of dyslexia may refuse to reveal that fact in college, even when it would mean access to services that could improve their success.

Ideally, we would diagnose a problem in the first week or so of class and send the students we believe may need additional help (beyond what our normal classroom practices are able to provide) for testing to an on campus, free testing service. I found that testing is frequently not offered. But even colleges and universities that offer testing often have wait lists and some costs (Crawford). Testing is not offered at many institutions where students are required to seek testing from private specialists in dyslexia and to pay for the testing themselves. The cost of testing isn't cheap due to the fact that it requires a licensed psychologist who specializes in testing (Pohlman). Testing also consumes a lot of time. It often takes as much as an entire semester or more to receive test results and in that time, many students fail their first writing courses.

As a result, it's important for us to become prepared to better work with these students, offering them the same help we would offer to any other students, but making sure that they understand how important that help may be for them to succeed. The types of help that are easily available at most institutions would be learning to utilize their teachers' office hours, learning to utilize the services of a tutoring center or writing center, learning to utilize the services of the library including online writing labs (OWLs) available on the Internet. In addition, it's imperative for students with dyslexia that they learn to use computers to write, especially those with grammar and spell checkers, word counts, Internet access, and any other types of assistance that helps students to see problems they might otherwise not see themselves. (To access OWLs use “online writing labs” as a search term in Google. Purdue's is the first to come up and is truly excellent with lots of MLA assistance.)

With students in basic writing courses, during class time I take the entire class to the places where help is available. I introduce them to the people there who can help them. It is a good idea to do this with all first year, first semester students, whether they are in basic writing classes or not. It's important for us to know the people in these centers of help for writers, too, so we can reassure our students that they will be welcomed, can tell them what the rules are, and in general help them to avoid embarrassment.

By assuming that all first year students could use a little extra help in making the transition from high school to college, the need for help can be discussed in class, so all students understand that needing help in college is normal for all students in all of their classes. Needing help is a no-brainer in math and science courses, where students often line up in the halls waiting for help from their professors, but it is still something that evokes issues of plagiarism in writing classes. The WPA Statement on Plagiarism can be of great help here to clarify what is and what is not plagiarism for first year college students many of whom need a great deal of help to succeed in college. This statement can be accessed online at http://www.wpacouncil.org/positions/ under the heading “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.”

Some of the signals that your students may have dyslexia rather than simply lacking writing skills include:

•  Sophisticated thinking skills demonstrated with writing that also seems disorganized. Most students will learn to control organization as their grasp of the material improves. If they don't, it's likely that dyslexia is interfering with that process.

•  Control over grammar, but serious problems with spelling. One of my students spelled psychiatrist “csikyatrisk.” A dictionary wouldn't have begun to help her sort out the spelling.

•  A disconnect between students' verbal fluency and their written fluency. Conversations with students about their ideas can offer us lots of help in seeing this lack of matching between what the students know and what they convey in writing.

•  An inability to distinguish between the word they want and the word(s) offered by the spellcheckers they are using. (Selecting “defiantly” when they want “definitely” is a classic example). Asking them to explain what they wanted the word to mean is a big help here, because students often understand the word and its meaning and use it correctly in speech, but visually can't distinguish it from similar looking or sounding words.

This list comes from my own experiences with dyslexic students, and is very incomplete.

One resource that is eminently scholarly in tone is the Comppile archives at http://comppile.tamucc.edu (Rich Haswell ). One source for a huge bibliography on teaching students with disabilities is found at the University of Minnesota . In addition they have written several reports on a universal design curriculum that they suggest works well for those students at the old CTAD site. CTAD stands for Curriculum Transformation and Disabilities. That site is now static, but can be reached by going to the University of Minnesota homepage and inserting "CTAD" in the homepage search engine. The home page is at http://www.umn.edu .

We need to observe our new writing students, with the thought that if they could write better, spell better, or organize their papers better, they probably would. Most of the time their teachers really have been teaching them all the writing skills they are not demonstrating to us. With more positive attitudes about our students and their abilities, it becomes easier to notice dyslexia when it's occurring in students' writing.

Questions for Thinking about This Issue

•  When we observe students who are not writing well, are they demonstrating a lack of education or dyslexia? How are these different?

•  If it's dyslexia, what are some of the signals we need to watch for?

•  What is our college or university's policy regarding help for students with dyslexia?

•  What does our college or university offer in terms of diagnosis of students with dyslexias? (There is more than one type of dyslexia, each with different problems they cause for students.)

•  If our college doesn't offer diagnosis for dyslexia, how can we intervene fairly (in ways that don't disadvantage other students) to help our students succeed in that extremely critical first semester of college when failure can cost students their desire to remain in college?

Works Cited

Teaching Basic Writing