News & Agenda
How do children learn to read – and where do problems start?
Eva Marinus receives Rubicon grant for research into dyslexia in Australia
What processes lie at the root of learning to read, and to read well? And how do differences emerge between strong and weak readers? These are the questions that Eva Marinus (Pedagogics and Didactics) is hoping to answer with her research, How do children learn to read? Understanding the dynamics between building up orthographic representations and lexical restructuring. She received a Rubicon grant of €56,000, and on 1 February 2010 she left for Australia to carry out her research at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science in Sydney.
The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science is the place to be for research into reading and dyslexia. Its director Anne Castles, whom Eva Marinus has already worked with in the past, is an absolute authority on reading problems.
Although research into dyslexia has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years, much has yet to be discovered. ‘One important reason for this is that it's a relatively young research subject,' says Marinus, who in January 2010 received a distinction for her doctoral thesis Word recognition processes in normal and dyslexic readers. ‘After all, until around 100 years ago, reading was restricted to the elite. In a very short span of time, society has evolved such that reading has become an essential life skill at every social level. Only then did we find that around 10 per cent of people have significant difficulties with reading.'
The differences between strong and weak readers are fairly small at first, but they rapidly take wildly different paths. Strong readers keep getting better and faster, build up more reading experience, and therefore keep getting better. Weak readers, on the other hand, continue to struggle to read quickly, if at all, so they build up little experience and end up lagging behind. ‘But it's still unclear where things go wrong, and what process lie at the root of it.'
Unravelling the dyslexia riddle
In her Rubicon research, Marinus will be trying to unravel at least part of the dyslexia riddle. She'll be investigating the interaction between orthographic representations (recognising and storing words) and two aspects of lexical restructuring, namely the capacity to differentiate between words that appear similar, and the recognition and application of syllables in new and familiar words. She hopes to find out if weaker readers have more difficulty with new words that appear similar to other words. It may be that those weaker readers who already know the word "cat" have more difficulty creating an orthographic representation of the word "cap". She'll also be using a longitudinal study to see if the presence of a high-frequency word that appears similar to another word has a positive or negative effect on the capacity to learn that second word. Alongside this, she will do research into whether the presence of syllables in familiar words influences the capacity to learn other words that contain the same syllable. Marinus anticipates that weaker readers will benefit less from the presence of familiar syllables when learning new words. Finally, Marinus plans to test her theory about learning syllables by means of syllable training.
No miracle treatment
The success of reading methods for dyslexics has so far proved fairly meagre. ‘We know that lots of extra reading practice helps. Research into more specific methods has so far not yielded much.'
In her doctoral research, Marinus looked closely at the often-used letter cluster method. In this method, children are encouraged not to read words letter by letter, but to use letter clusters, such as ‘st' in the word ‘stick'. She found that children - dyslexic or not - are instinctively disinclined to use letter clusters. Even if they do explicitly learn the clusters, they don't end up reading any faster. The ideal method therefore remains elusive. According to Marinus, it's going to take quite some effort to find it. ‘Dyslexia is rooted in the brain, and it manifests very early. I don't expect any miracle treatment to be found in the short term. For the moment, it's particularly important to find out where exactly things go wrong. Then we can develop specific methods in response. One of those methods could be the syllable method, and that's why I'm going to research and test that method in my research. I don't expect it to be the whole solution, but perhaps we can bring about a small improvement in reading skills.'
Author: Esther van Bochove, FMG Communication department