Higher Education Students with Readingand Writing Difficulties

Abstract

ISSN 1918-5227 Pages 129134 Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/eei This Article is brought to you by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Exceptionality Education International by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact jspecht@uwo.ca. Recommended Citation Kirby, J. R. (2007) Higher Education Students with Readingand Writing Difficulties. Exceptionality Education International, 17, 129-134. Retrieved from http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/eei/vol17/iss2/1 EDITORIAL SPECIAL THEME ISSUE Higher Education Students with Reading and Writing Difficulties John R. Kirby Queen’s University The papers in this special issue address research and practical issues surrounding the growing number of students in higher education with literacy difficulties. This introduction raises some of the salient issues and provides a road-map to how the issues are woven into the papers. Two factors are contributing to an increase in the number of students in higher education with difficulties in reading and writing. First, as universities and colleges raise their goals to attract a greater proportion of the population as students, more and more students who would previously have not been seen as suitable will be coming to campus. At least some of these “new” students will have lower reading and writing skills. Improved elementary and secondary education may counteract this to some extent, through improved literacy education. Second, and more central to this special issue, is the growing realization that some students with serious reading and writing difficulties, those termed reading disabled or writing disabled or learning disabled, have enormous talents that are constrained or even hidden by relatively specific difficulties with literacy. We are still coming to grips with the idea that it is no more fair, or just, to deny these latter students a place in higher education than it would be to deny a place to students with, for instance, mobility difficulties. Broadly speaking, the six papers in this issue address three overlapping themes: (a) the identification and description of the students with literacy difficulties, (b) theories about the causes and mechanisms of their difficulties, and 129 Exceptionality Education Canada 2007, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 129-134 (c) issues about how such students compensate with their difficulties and how institutions should accommodate them. Identification and Description Who are the students with literacy difficulties, what are they like, and how should we identify them? It is not even clear whether we should describe them as having a disability or a difficulty, the former suggesting a more permanent trait, the latter a more malleable characteristic. The traditional approach, often enshrined in law, is that learning disabled individuals must show a discrepancy between their cognitive ability (e.g., IQ) and achievement (e.g., reading scores), and that the formal assessment process should be in the hands of a certified psychologist. This can be an expensive and slow process, and is often omitted – see the results of A. Harrison, Larochette and Nichols in this issue, who point out that students without formal diagnoses are usually not eligible for special treatments or accommodations. Are the formally-identified individuals different from those who are described by teachers as having reading or writing difficulties, or for that matter, different from those who self-report having those difficulties? How, and what are the implications? Two papers in this issue explore the nature of those who describe themselves as having literacy difficulties, often in the absence of formal diagnoses: McGonnell, Parrila and Deacon, and Parrila, Georgiou and Corkett. The provocative suggestion is that self-report may be a valid way to identify reading disabled students, especially those who have compensated to some degree for their difficulties. Several of the current papers examined the issue of diversity in students with literacy difficulties. Parrila et al. and McGonnell et al. both found evidence for considerable diversity in strengths and weaknesses in students with reading difficulties. G. Harrison and Beres explored writing difficulties, a topic of central importance to many university instructors. Writing difficulties were not explored in the other papers, but we can assume that this is another dimension of variability. Each of the papers in this issue shows that individuals in higher education with current diagnoses, and those who report having had difficulty learning to read, continue to demonstrate weaknesses in various aspects of reading and writing, though the results are far from consistent. Some of the key characteristics of reading disability in children, such as phonological awareness and naming speed (Rapid Automatized Naming) are less apparent in these adults. 130 Exceptionality Education Canada, 2007, Vol. 17, No. 2 Kirby