Teaching adults with specific language disability

Abstract

Ever since man developed a written system of communication, certain individuals, even with normal intelligence, have been unable to learn to read and spell. The fault has not been their own, nor always Society's, but prob ably Nature's. This difficulty has been termed specific language disability, specific dyslexia, or developmental dyslexia, but by whatever name it is called (and there are many others) it makes more and more trouble for its victims as their culture comes more and more to demand literacy. Much has already been written in this journal about the varieties of language learning failure as it results from environmental and physical causes and from the constitutional, probably hereditary, condition often called dys lexia. The description of the latter condition and its incidence among school children have been set forth again and again. Our experience in Santa Bar bara, California, schools bears out these descriptions and figures for this ap parently universal condition which appears in all literate countries. In this paper I shall, therefore, emphasize a hitherto less-stressed aspect of the prob lem, one with which we, here, have had considerable recent experience. What happens when the dyslexic school child grows up ? Are there adult dyslexics? What are they like? Can anything be done to help them? What are some of the specific problems and educational-therapeutic ways to set adults free from this handicap? By and large, it has been our experience that beyond-school dyslexics, if their problems have not been treated in childhood, are still having just the problems we meet in children, but with an intensification of the social and emotional consequences resulting from added years of failure, frustration, and hopelessness. Often, indeed, the children we are seeing as dyslexics or reading failures in school are their children.