OPENING ADDRESS

The great majority of children starting school do so with great expectations of learning to read. Surveys have actually shown that this interest is so powerful that hardly anything can prevent an inquisitive seven-year-old from learning the letters of the alphabet and eventually putting them together into something intelligibile. Exaggerating somewhat, the method by which reading is learned could therefore be said to be of fairly minor importance. Most children are so determined to learn that they overcome the difficulties in their path.

Some of these beginners will experience things differently. To begin with they are just as interested in penetrating the mysteries of the alphabet, but in their case the learning process goes awry. The letters get jumbled and will not let themselves be marchalled into a meaningful text. The children see their classmates forging ahead while they themselves wrestle with letters which are hard to copy, comprehend or enjoy. The other children can, they cannot. This situation takes the wind out of their sails.

These are pupils of normal intelligence. No damage has been discovered in terms of speech, vision or hearing. They have played quite naturally together with other children and enjoyed the same things, but now they suddenly discover that they can’t manage.

Since so much of our acquisition of knowledge is dependent on the written word, the effects are of course amplified in all the subjects studied by those who are unable to read or write. Reading becomes a bore, and even books for children and young persons and, later on, adult books and newspapers remain inaccessible to these pupils.

There are figures indicating that between 70 and 80 per cent of the inmates of our prisons, suffer from reading and writing disabilities. I am not saying that reading and writing disabilities lead to criminality, but it is obvious that a person who is unable to read or write is more vulnerable than person of normal ability in these respects.

Here in Sweden, alarming reports of one kind or another are published from time to time. Last autumn a great deal of attention was aroused by a television programme showing how adults who are ‘functionally illiterate’ experience their eductional career and their everyday life. In the debate to which the programme gave rise in the Swedish press, it was said that there were between 1.2 and 1.6 million functional illiterates in this country, in other words that one Swede in five was unable to read and write properly. But the definition of reading ability is quite a problem in itself. No doubt many people feel functionally illiterate in certain situations. The instructions accompanying our income tax forms or other printed matter from our public authorities are sometimes couched in such language that one begins to doubt one’s own literacy. But we do have a problem here: many adults today are’ genuinely unable to read and understand instructions and information which they need to assimilate in order to cope with life in our society. This, however, is a problem which should be tackled from another angle: the authorities must learn to write in a language which all citizens can understand.

The present symposium is concerned with a smaller group, but a group which is still far too large, namely people who cannot even read a simple text or who have great difficulty in reading.

It is not easy for a reading person to appreciate the implications of this situation. For my own part I have worked with reading and writing disabilities and have succeeded, after a great deal of effort, in penetrating the experiences of pupils labouring under these difficulties. At least, I thought so until recently I was given a further reminder of our lack of empathy. Reading whodunnits is one of my relaxations, and recently I obtained a copy of “A Judgement in Stone” by Ruth Rendell. She describes, most acutely, a woman who is only able to recognize a few letters of the alphabet but has learned at an early age to conceal her handicap, so that when she is 40 years old there is still nobody who knows. We are shown, through her, what it is like living in a world where reading comes naturally to everybody else, how suspicious she is when she sees something written on a notice board, how helpless she is when given a piece of paper with instructions written on it, how she has longed for a television set for years but is incapable of the formfilling which this requires, how she eventually gets a television set through her job but when it breaks down is unable to look up the appropriate number in her telephone directory, how she goes to a railway station and whenever she asks which platform she is to go to receives the same answer: It’s on the notive board. She develops a fear of other people, a craving for isolation, emotional coldness - until in the end, of course, disaster supervenes. It is compulsive reading.

In my opinion it is absolutely essential for more people to realize the implications of the handicap which reading and writing disabilities amount to. Otherwise it will be impossible for us to provide adequate assistance and we will fail to observe that not the least of our tasks must be to sustain the pupils’ self-confidence. This applies to everybody, but it applies especially to teachers. I am convinced that our junior level teachers fully realize the problems which reading and writing disabilities can entail. On the other hand I know that the problem and its consequences are not always observed at higher levels. Many people imagine that reading and writing disabilities only affect language subjects, but all subjects - mathematics included - require an ability to read and write. A superficial knowledge of the problem is not enough; an active determination to achieve empathy is called for.

Reading education is a pre-eminently individual process, and it must proceed in such a manner that the pupil is not subjected to stress, is allowed to work at his or her own speed and is given the right stimulus, added to which the teacher-pupil relationship must be one of confidence and trust. Reading and writing practice is not the exclusive concern of our Swedish teachers or our remedial teachers. Everybody who in one way or another gets the children to, read or receives written work from them must pay attention to the problems of pupils with reading and writing difficulties.

What use is it to the pupil our having instructions to the effect that special allowance must be made when awarding marks to pupils with reading and writing disabilities, if the problems are not observed and treated with all the means at our disposal? The outlook for eleven-year-olds with a poor command of reading and writing is often very bleak. Teaching goes on regardless. Most knowledge is derived from books, and the poor reader has difficulty in keeping up. In practice he is put out of the running, and the struggle for the really high marks is reserved for others. Difficulty in expressing oneself is writing means poor marks for tests.

The teaching of many school subjects in Sweden has come to be dominated for a great deal of the time by work books in which the pupils have to give predetermined answers on a particular line. There are cases of pupils experimenting with acids and bases and then having to turn to their work books and tick off the right alternative for the colour assumed by the litmus paper. Teaching of this kind is definitely not calculated to strengthen the learning of language or concepts, and certainly not where poor readers and writers are concerned if the answers have to be extracted from textbooks with vast quantities of small print.

It is important to remember that we are talking about pupils of normal ability, pupils who would do well with other teaching materials or other teaching routines. Sweden has developed quite a few ways of assisting children with reading and writing disabilities. Unfortunately I cannot claim that we have been successful in helping all of them. Particularly those with grave disabilities remain unhelped - owing to lack of resources, but also for lack of knowledge and empathy.

Oddly enough, the underlying causes of dyslexia are still to a great extent unknown. But we know that persons who receive little or no support in their early linguistic development are quite hard hit by these problems. I have studied with interest the research findings of the Norwegian Kirsten Pauss at the Nic Waals Institute. His theory that developments in early infancy, from birth to eighteen months, affect subsequent ability to learn a language is well worth pondering. His method of treatment, with the stipulation of parental participation as well as powerful therapeutic elements for the pupil, may be a signpost for persons with really grave reading and writing disabilities. Moreover, some of these pupils also have other problems to contend with, such as retarded speech, vision impairments or perhaps hearing damage.

I have also studied theories maintaining that reading disabilities stem from vision defects of various kinds. Of course, the correct reproduction of letters of symbols in a simple vision test is one thing, but a completely different mechanism may need to be checked in order to ascertain whether co-ordinated vision functions, whether symbols can be put together to form an intelligible message and so on.

And this brings me on to a field with which I am not at all familiar, namely the functioning of the brain, the way in which concepts originate...