Dyslexia Research
Tonight I inform the House of the important and innovative work being done at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. The centre is conducting a number of research projects into dyslexia and other reading difficulties that are of vital international significance. All researchers work under the direction of Professor Max Coltheart, acknowledged as a world leader in the field of cognitive science.
In addition to being the current president of Learning Difficulties Australia as well as the international body and also the Australian Federation of Speld Associations, in 2007 he was awarded the CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science. Australia is on the cutting edge of these new discoveries.
One example of the work the centre—referred to as MACCS—is conducting is a reading training study focusing on the 10 per cent of children who find it unusually difficult to learn to read. Investigators have known for sometime that poor reading leads to eventual academic failure. However, it is only now coming to light what a major impact poor reading has on a child’s long-term health. For example, studies show that teenagers with poor reading skills are three times more likely to consider taking their own lives, six times more likely to drop out of school and twice as likely to suffer from depression or to have addiction problems than those with average reading ability.
Further studies show that virtually all prisoners in our jails and correctional centres suffer from the same problems. Therefore, it is extremely important to be able to identify and treat reading problems in children as early as possible in order to prevent them from developing these serious long-term health and social consequences.
The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science researchers are also conducting a clinical trial of different reading treatments for children who have developmental dyslexia, which means that they have severe problems learning to read, or specific language impairment, which means they have problems learning their own native language.
According to the investigators, developmental dyslexia is a broad term that includes a number of subtypes. For example, some children are poor at reading with letter-sound rules, while others are poor at reading whole words by sight. However, most children have both types: they are poor at using letter-sound rules and reading whole words by sight.
Although that is already established, there remain two major questions because very little is known about the reading skills of children with specific language impairment. It is unknown how to effectively tailor different types of treatments to the different types of dyslexia. Over the next five years, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science will study 180 children with dyslexia and offer them different forms of treatment to see what works best.
Before and after each treatment, children will complete a large battery of tests. I have seen some children undertaking the tests in the laboratory. The team will use the resulting data to identify the patterns of reading impairment seen in children and determine which types of treatment are most effective for the different types of dyslexia.
Major advances have been made in recent years in educators’ understanding of reading and how it is learnt. The importance of basic sounding-out skills is now widely accepted. However, skilled reading also involves being able to recognise words by sight, especially words that cannot be sounded out easily. Not enough is known about how children learn to recognise words by sight and what might help them to do this better.
In a project funded this year by the Australian Research Council, researchers are looking at how children’s knowledge of the meanings of words influences them. They are also examining whether words are learnt more easily if they are presented in meaningful contexts.
Another interesting project is trying to identify in advance which children will need help with reading so that early intervention can be undertaken. The current research focuses on the fact that one in four of all children, not only those with learning difficulties, leave primary school with inadequate reading skills. Most of them could have been assisted with appropriate group intervention. However, some will need far more intensive, individual instruction to succeed.
A great deal of time, resources and emotional distress would be saved if we knew who these children were before they failed. This research aims to develop a method to identify the dyslexic children before they actually fail. Then, if those slow readers fail to respond to group intervention, they will receive intensive individual intervention.
This will help channel the limited resources for helping dyslexics more effectively. The findings from this research project will enable educators to determine the most appropriate programs of instruction for individual readers. I congratulate Professor Max Coltheart and his team for training public school teachers in the new methodology.